Awards
Anthony Hecht won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968 for The Hard Hours.
Synopses & Reviews
The poetry of Anthony Hecht has been praised by Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes, among others, for its sure control of difficult material and its unique music and visual precision. This new volume is the fruit of a mellowing maturity that carries with it a smoky bitterness, a flavor of ancient and experienced wisdom, as in this stanza from Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven:
A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,
The stately dance advances; these are airs
Bone-deep and numbing as I should know
by now,
Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs.
Hechts verse by turns lyric and narrative, formal and free is grounded in the compassion that comes from a deep understanding of every kind of human depredation, yet is tempered by flashes of wry comedy, and still more by innocent pleasure in the gifts of the natural world. Followers of his poetry will recognize an evolution of style in many of these poems a quiet and understated voice, passing through darkness toward realms of delight.
"Some years no, decades! ago, Anthony Hecht was pleased to call the poems in The Hard Hours, his second book, "a few snapshots from along the Via Negativa." Loyal to that figuration the poet remains, though how much more intense the chiaroscuro here, how much deeper the imprint: these are the poems of Horatio after so much of Denmarks personnel has been cleared away, meditating loss and survival, rich with a survivors torn wisdom. For all the glee of the poesis, Hechts lines are severe even in their civility, their music wild even in its mastery. Rendered in his eighth book is the judgment of an unrelenting and an unreconciled art."
Review
"The Darkness and the Light confirms rather than extends the domain of Hecht's art. His gifts are of a kind rare today-seriousness, intelligence, formal discipline and he has expressed as skillfully as any writer of the last fifty years the anxiety of the civilized mind facing the large and small barbarisms of the age." Adam Kirsch, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
An exquisite book in which a series of poems about biblical characters -- "Samson", "Saul and David", "Judith", and so on -- provides the backdrop for other reflections on both the beauty and the darkness in contemporary life. We see ourselves in fresh light as Hecht illuminates the simililarites between our own age and the biblical world, and finds postmodern sadness in stories like that of Miriam, who announces in her poem, "I had a nice voice once, and a large following./I was, you might say, a star". The centerpiece of the volume is the stunning "Sacrifice", a three-part poem that connects the story of Abraham and Isaac to an arresting Second World War scene unfolding in provincial occupied France in 1945.
Throughout, there is a poignant sense of life lived and catalogued by a mature sensibility. As Hecht writes with clear-eyed grace in "Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven",
About the Author
Anthony Hecht is the author of seven books of poetry, among them The Hard Hours, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968, and, more recently, Flight Among the Tombs. In 1984 he received the Eugenio Montale Award for lifetime achievement in poetry, and in 2000 the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He has written a critical study of the poetry of W. H. Auden, and On the Laws of the Poetic Art (Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts). He taught for some years at Bard College, the University of Rochester and Georgetown University, and now lives in Washington, D.C.