3.5
Bewilderment
ByPublisher Description
To read David Ferry's
is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century.
Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry's use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it's like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption.
Ferry's translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them.
"These poems highlight an age-old quest for truth that leads the speaker to consider his present and past, and to translate works by Horace, Virgil, Catullus and others . . . vivid and sometimes heartbreaking."—
"Astonishing—a haunted book where ghosts prove that the haunted are still alive and allow for the continuing company of literature."—
"A necessary book . . . shocking and heartbreaking."—
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesBewilderment Reviews
3.5
Philip Harrell
Created over 2 years agoShare
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Naomi Timm
Created almost 8 years agoShare
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Lynsy
Created over 8 years agoShare
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“I felt that the translations took away from the original poems. I found myself comparing Virgil's and Ferry's words and styles.
Read the review on my blog https://littlebookjockey.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/its-the-great-catch-up-round-up-of-junejuly-2017-charlie-brown/#more-2623/ .”
Sarah Dizon
Created over 10 years agoShare
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