Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Daryl Hine's seventh book of poetry is a frustrating mixture of crisp and sophisticated verbal wit and sentimental speech- and preachifying. Hine's master themes of time's passage and language's insufficiency are movingly wrought up in a linguistic texture infused with their author's evident love of the history of words (Hine is a student of Neo-Latin poetry). Yet these themes too often terminate in a too-wistful yearning for what in Hine's vocabulary is the immediacy of a 'translation' (linguistic, temporal, and sexual) into the mind and body of another, a unification whose ambiguous symbol, appropriately and predictably, is homosexual love. Even these passages are redeemed, however, by Hine's metrical virtuosity, which runs the gamut from breathtaking enjambment to full-dress imitation of the prosody of Eliot and Frost." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)