'Again, Great Season'

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year. They return to a season or month they find thematically or emotionally rich. Keats, obviously, was an autumn man. Winter I associate with Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. Howard Nemerov sub-specialized in autumn blurring into winter. In the North, that signifies October, with early echoes, some years, in September. At that time, out in the fields, the golden rod is tall and turning brown. The goldfinches are busy harvesting thistle seeds. The asters grow dense and bend to the ground. They will survive until after the first snow. I can remember snow falling on my birthday, October 26, when I was a kid in Cleveland. Here is Nemerov’s “Again” (The Western Approaches, 1975): 

“Again, great season, sing it through again

Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change

That makes October burn out red and gold

And color bleed into the world and die,

And butterflies among the fluttering leaves

Disguise themselves until the few last leaves

Spin to the ground or to the skimming streams

That carry them along until they sink,

And through the muted land, the nevergreen

Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,

The wind go ashen, till one afternoon

The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale

Above the river on whose slow black flood

The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.”

 

A single long sentence across fourteen lines, moving like the season itself, inexorably. In Texas, I miss the drama of seasonal change. Here it’s still high summer, near one-hundred degrees every day. This could last for months. Nemerov’s theme is change, nature’s perpetual self-renewal.

 

Duff is Homer Simpson’s beer of choice, a common surname and Arabic for “drum,” but the OED gives seven definitions -- four nouns, an adjective, two verbs – from “dough, paste” to “the buttocks, the backside” (as in “Get off your duff”). “Up the duff,” we learn, means “pregnant,” and “duff” in golf means “to perform (a shot) badly” (thus, “duffer”). Best of all, “duff” is the stuff on the ground in a forest, decaying leaves, needles, branches and bark, midway between living biomass and soil. This is Nemerov’s sense. Richard Wilbur uses it this way in “To Ishtar”:

 

“It is all we can do to witness

The waste motions of empty trees,

The joyless tittering duff, the grass-mats

Blanched and scurfy with ice.”

 

Here is another of Howard Nemerov’s poems dedicated to change and the arrival of his favorite time of year, “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”

'Much to Enjoy and Admire'

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation. We talked about the Cleveland we knew as kids – the main library downtown on Superior Avenue, Kay’s Books over on Prospect, a bar called Hernando’s Hideaway on Chester by the Greyhound station, Grabowski’s Music Studio where Ken started playing clarinet at age seven. And our Uncle Harry who, back in the Sixties, had wired his pickup truck for sound so, from blocks away, we heard him blasting polka music. And our cousin Lenny who had an electric guitar, though the only tune he knew how to play was the Twilight Zone theme. In retrospect, I see that what these random things had in common was some degree of amusement. No resentments or regrets. We weren’t recalling the miseries, painful and trifling. This wasn’t a conscious strategy. We shared the memories that bubbled to the surface. 

Sitting beside his bed in hospice, something moved me to bring up Montaigne, author of essays that are of central importance to me. Ken had never read the Frenchman. I spoke from memory, mostly half-remembering one of the early essays, “That our happiness must not be judged until after our death”:

 

“There are gallant and fortunate deaths. I have seen death bring a wonderfully brilliant career, and that in its flower, to such a splendid end that in my opinion the dead man’s ambitions and courageous designs had nothing so lofty about them as their interruption. He arrived where he aspired to without going there, more grandly and gloriously than he had desired or hoped. And by his fall he went beyond the power and the fame to which he had aspired by his career.”

Ken died in hospice on August 24, 2024. He had stopped talking several days earlier and entered a blank, frozen, apparently painless state. His son and I played music for him. Donald Frame writes in his biography of the great essayist: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”

[The Montaigne passage is from Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957). He is author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]

'Nothing is Redundant, Nothing Wanting'

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.” The essay originally served as the introduction to an anthology, Epigrammatum delectus (1659), intended for use in classrooms. It omitted some poems by such epigrammatic masters as Martial and Catullus because they were “quite filthy and obscene,” Cunningham tells us in his introduction. He continues:

 “Young people are led by curiosity to read these, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such books; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.”

 

We sense Cunningham, an epigrammatic descendent of Jonson and Landor, and translator of Martial and Catullus, is having a good time here. His own epigrams could be rather salty, as in “Epitaph for Someone or Other”:

 

“Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,

And naked was my pastime in between.”

 

And “The Lights of Love”:

 

“The ladies in my life, serially sexed,

Unscrew one lover and screw in the next.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek epigramma, “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today.

 

Another gifted epigrammist, R.L. Barth, republished Nicole’s essay in Cunningham’s forty-four-page translation, with notes, in 1997. Bob and Cunningham would concur with this passage near the conclusion of Nicole’s essay:

 

 “[O]f all the special capabilities of the epigram none is more difficult to realise or more rarely achieved than the adroit handling, the suitable and easy unfolding, of the subject so that nothing is redundant, nothing wanting, nothing out of order, obscure, or tangled up in verbiage, and yet at the same time nothing too unexpected, nothing not adequately prepared for. Martial is pre-eminent in this; he develops his subjects so aptly, clearly, and perceptively that he obtains for ideas of no special note otherwise a good deal of distinction by the charm of the handling.”

 

Cunningham translated Martial’s 4.33:

 

“You write, you tell me, for posterity.

May you be read, my friend, immediately.”

 

Here is Barth’s version of the same epigram:

 

“Your manuscripts are stacked, bookcases groan,

And yet you’ve published nothing of your own.

‘My heirs will publish . . .’ What? After you’re dead?

Sosibianus, it’s past time you’re read.”

 

Cunningham was born on this date, August 23, in 1911, and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Barth’s versions of Martial are collected in Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]

'Nothing to Be Despised'

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.” 

Leave it to Dr. Johnson to remind us of the vanity of our wishes. Human striving often comes to little or nothing. Above he writes of a poet whose posthumous place in English literature seems to confirm Johnson’s dismissive verdict. Perhaps a few eighteenth-century scholars still read the poetry of George Lyttelton. I know him almost exclusively through Johnson’s brief biography in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, most of which is devoted to Lyttelton’s public life as a Member of Parliament and Chancellor of the Exchequer, not his work as a poet.

 

Johnson speaks well of a single poem by Lyttleton, “Advice to Belinda,” also known as “Advice to a Lady.” It “contains,” he writes, “much truth and much prudence, very elegantly and vigorously expressed, and shews a mind attentive to life, and a power of poetry which cultivation might have raised to excellence.” Note the qualification. Lyttelton writes:

 

“Hard is the fortune that your sex attends;

Women, like Princes, find few real friends:

All who approach them their own ends pursue:

Lovers and ministers seldom are true.”

 

Even the praise is lukewarm. He writes: “Lord Lyttelton’s Poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment, devoting part of his time to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and little to be admired. . . . His little performances, whether Songs or Epigrams, are sometimes spritely, and sometimes insipid. His epistolary pieces have a smooth equability, which cannot much tire, because they are short, but which seldom elevates or surprizes.”

 

Lyttleton was born in 1709 and died on this date, August 22, in 1773 at age sixty-four.

'The Boundless Complexity of Life'

The poet W.S. Di Piero introduces Montaigne without mentioning his name: “‘Essay’ has embedded in it ‘assay,’ ‘weighing,’ ‘testing,’ ‘proofing,’ ‘trying out,” ‘attempting.’ When writing prose I’m arguing mostly with myself and the friends and predecessors whose voices are in my head.”

What passes for essay writing today too often looks like someone laying down the law, telling readers what they ought to be doing, thinking or saying. It comes off as bullying monomania. I want more from an essay than a cavalcade of opinions, which are usually the least important and interesting things I can know about you. Tell me about your experience. Tell me what you know. Share your learning. Don’t just spout off like the drunk at the end of the bar or some crank on A.M. radio. How long since you last read an essay that moved you or illuminated some aspect of your life that has been puzzling or troubling? For me it happened Thursday while reading Joseph Epstein’s “Turning Ninety” in the September issue of Commentary.

 

In his first paragraph Epstein writes: “I should like to have written an essay in which I toted up how age has brought me wisdom and given me a decidedly sunny view of life. Alas, it is not so.” Old Epstein hands will recognize the tune and hum along. The essayist will turn ninety in January and his situation report is neither rosy nor despairing. He writes like an adult, rare in contemporary letters:

 

“While I am grateful to be arriving at 90, life now seems less amusing. More and more, it seems about loss, loss both personal and of so many of the things that made life interesting and often amusing. The loss of friends, to begin with.”

 

Throughout “Turning Ninety,” I experienced little shocks of recognition like that. What Epstein recounts isn’t peculiar to his life. For instance:

 

“Then there are the many things I have lost interest in. Travel is high among them.”

 

“An ‘expert economist’ is an oxymoron. In the current day, few are the experts who aren’t already lined up for or against Donald Trump. Some peddle opinions full-time; it is their job.”

 

“[M]y walk, too, has changed, almost but nearly qualifying for Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks. I fear falling, which I have done three or four times, and so when out of doors walk looking down at the pavement. ‘Don’t fall’ is my mantra.”

 

“I, at any rate, live on the culture of the past: the great Russian and English novelists, French and Italian painters, the American Songbook.”

 

Epstein concludes with a fine resolution in the musical sense: “Allow me to close this essay—disquisition? diatribe? sustained groan?—with a toast. May all who have read it attain the age of 90 and as far beyond as seems to give them more pleasure than pain. May they end their days on neither a bang nor a whimper but a quiet smile in recognition of the boundless complexity of life.”

 

Epstein devoted an essay to the first essayist, Montaigne, in the March 1993 issue of Commentary. It too nicely resolves:

 

“By being a man on whom not much was lost, by studying the complex variousness of human nature through looking first into his own soul, by carefully considering his experience of the world, by not asking the impossible of himself and being suspicious of those who asked it of others, by understanding that man’s problem on earth is to attain such wisdom as will help him live a fit and reasonably happy life, Montaigne, for those who read him more than four centuries after he wrote, continues to lessen life’s terror and to add to its pleasure. More than this no writer can hope to do, and none has done it better than Michel de Montaigne.”

'The Pure Astonishment of Life'

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “I thought you hated science fiction,” he writes. “You always seemed like a snob about it.” Guilty as charged, I guess. I read science fiction and related genres from roughly ages ten to fourteen. At some point I just lost interest. The arrival of puberty may have been an unrelated factor. A serious reader is forever culling aspects of his past, discarding previous favorites. Call it maturation or honing one’s critical gifts. The genre was no longer satisfying to read. I’ve never had a grand theoretical explanation for the change, though I retain a general lack of interest in any thesis-driven fiction -- 1984, for instance. 

I don’t recall why I read Gibson’s novel. I remember it getting a lot of attention when it was published in 1984, even in non-sci-fi circles. Perhaps a friend recommended it. Neuromancer is not the only novel I’ve read about which I remember nothing or almost nothing. The same can be said of books by such non-genre writers as Conrad Aiken, James Baldwin, Thomas Wolfe and others. In fiction I look for an ineffable but recognizable quality called by William Maxwell, in a note to his collection of reviews and essays The Outermost Dream (1989), “the breath of life.” He writes:

 

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”

 

No binding theory there, but I intuitively understand what Maxwell is getting at. In 1997, in the new introduction to The Outermost Dream, reissued by Graywolf Press, Maxwell writes: “[W]hen I read for my own enjoyment I cannot—or mostly do not—read authors whose way of writing doesn’t give me pleasure. But of course style is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.”

 

It’s a quality difficult to articulate and simple to perceive. Henry James’ fiction has it, as does Tolstoy’s and George Eliot’s. They convince us. We forget them and ourselves while reading. Science fiction no longer does that for me.

'It Happens Every Year Almost the Same'

When we think of ferocious predators among animals we likely think of sharks and grizzly bears, big creatures with teeth. But I remember as a kid watching ladybugs on a rose bush moving through aphids like a combine through wheat. They can consume thousands in their brief life span.

Another small and notably efficient hunter is the order Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies. I spent a day in an upstate New York marsh with a neuroethologist, a biologist who studies how an animal’s nervous system determines its behavior. Odonata was his specialty. His research showed their kill rate for insects, most often mosquitoes, topped ninety-seven percent. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision, and their field of vision is 360 degrees. Like ladybugs they are harmless to humans.

I remembered that day when reading the Louisiana poet David Middleton’s “August into Autumn” (Time Will Tell: Collected Poems (Texas Review Press, 2025):

 

“It happens every year almost the same

And always late in August when we pause

Just long enough to see what time has done,

Sly changes nearly imperceptible

Moment to moment holding us at last

While molting birds gone quiet watch the stars

And summer moves to its appointed end.

 

“The mated dragonflies, whose months are years,

Their eggs already floating in the reeds,

Now glide more slowly over lake and blade,

The great blue skimmer, eastern amber-wing

Still hunting for mosquitoes, dusk and dawn,

But farther off as the dense swarms grow thin

And crickets call all night through cooling trees.”

 

Middleton describes the slow change of seasons in the South, with none of the North’s drama or unambiguous demarcations. Autumn is little different from summer here if you’re not paying attention. Temperature changes are incremental. No gaudy red or yellow explosion among the maples (we have few maples). We’ll see more hummingbirds here in September as they migrate south. For a transplanted Northerner, autumn in Texas and Louisiana can be a disappointment. In “The Dragonfly,” Louise Bogan describes the insect’s “ceaseless movement, / Unending hunger . . .” In the poem’s final lines she is almost clinical: “And you fall / With the other husks of summer.”

'A Wild Sostenuto of the Heart'

At the center of the screen is an acute triangle with a rounded bottom. Its shape resembles the pattern left by wipers on a dirty windshield, inverted. Before the device is activated it’s a gray blank and reminded me of the opening sentence of a novel I read more than forty years ago: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” -- the only thing I remember from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. 

This was my second echocardiogram in less than two weeks. The first detected “reduced systolic function.” The second was performed using contrast. The technician put transparent jelly on the left side of my chest and moved the transducer probe around until she got a clean image. That picture replaces the “dead channel”: my pulsing heart. Seeing it seems miraculous, a gift denied us for most of human history. I remembered the first time I saw an ultrasound performed, which was also the first time I saw my oldest son, in utero.

 

The word that came to mind is sostenuto, which I learned from the fifth stanza of Richard Wilbur’s poem “For C.” (Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (2000):

 

“Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love

Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

 

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,

Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,

A passion joined to courtesy and art

Which has the quality of something made,

Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,

Like a rose window or the firmament.”

 

Wilbur wrote the poem for his wife, known as Charlee. Sotenuto is a musical term, an adjective meaning, according to the OED, “to be sung or played in a sustained manner.” It’s from the Italian verb for sustain, which is precisely what I want my heart to continue doing for me.

'Conserved in Treasure, Finally'

Rare is the poet who can simultaneously think and sing. C.H. Sisson once quoted the French critic Charles Maurras saying, “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” Prose writers don’t talk much about the rhythms of their words, which is probably a good thing. Prose is the draft horse of style, getting the heavy job done. Too much filigree and the language turns precious. The reader rightly suspects the writer is compensating for sparsity of content (e.g., John Updike). 

Words are never in isolation and are more like notation in a musical score than stones in a mosaic. One word follows another according to the logic of sound and sense. We spend a lot of time matching words to the rhythm that already exists in our heads, a rhythm we can’t begin to perceive until we start arranging the words. Sometimes for emphasis we purposely break the rhythm, always with resolution or absence of resolution in mind.

 

Much of the poetry written in the last century and a quarter is indistinguishable from prose – often tone-deaf prose. No need to name names. A writer who wrote superior prose and poetry, a rare feat of juggling, is Janet Lewis. Consider “Carmel Highlands” (Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, ed. R.L. Barth, 2000):

 

“Below the gardens and the darkening pines

The living water sinks among the stones,

Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones

Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines.

The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines,

And now the definite mountain-side disowns

The fluid world, the immeasurable zones.

Then white oblivion swallows all designs.

 

“But still the rich confusion of the sea,

Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing,

Rises through veils of silence past the trees;

In restless repetition bound, yet free,

Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing

An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.”

 

The words float like leaves in the currents of a river. There’s no hurry, no rush to the finish, but the lines are suffused with a steady, uninsistent sense of momentum. Throughout the seventy years of Lewis’ writing life, she wrote poems in both form and free verse. She is a writer seriously in need of rediscovery. One of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), is among the four or five finest ever written by an American. Here is a 1945 poem, “Lines with a Gift of Herbs”:

 

“The summer's residue

In aromatic leaf,

Shrunken and dry, yet true

In fragrance, their belief,

  

“These from the hard earth drew

Essence of rosemary,

Of lavender, faintly blue,

While unconfused nearby

 

“From the same earth distilled

Grey sage and savory,

Each one distinctly willed,

Stoic morality.

 

“The Emperor said: ‘Though all

Conspire to break thy will,

Clear stone, thou emerald, shall

Be ever emerald still.’

 

“And these, small, unobserved,

Through summer chemistry,

Have all their might conserved

In treasure, finally.”

 

“The Emperor” is Marcus Aurelius in Meditations (trans. Maxwell Staniforth): “Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to keep myself good; just as a gold piece, or an emerald, or a purple robe insists perpetually, ‘Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to remain an emerald and keep my color true.’” The passage suggests Lewis’ courage and steadfastness, her “Stoic morality.” Here is a 1941 poem she wrote after the death of a friend and fellow novelist, “For Elizabeth Madox Roberts”:

 

“From the confusion of estranging years,

The imperfections of the changing heart,

This hour leaves only tears;

Tears, and my earliest love, Elizabeth, and changeless art.”

 

Lewis, in her fiction and verse, is one of the few essential American writers of the last century, along with Cather, Nabokov and her husband, Yvor Winters. Lewis was born on this date, August 17, in 1899 and died in 1998 at ninety-nine.

'A Very Deadly Sort of Slave Feeling'

Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidity, like a low-budget horror movie. There’s a theory going around, probably rooted in Freudian quackery, that all artistic creation is about death or its denial. Yet, somehow – often formally, with her nursery rhymes and rhythms – Smith charms and amuses us. Death is impertinent. “Up and Down” appeared in her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937: 

“Up and down the street they go

Tapping tapping to and fro

What they see I do not know

 

“Up and down the streets they hurry

Push and rush and jerk and worry

Full of ineffectual flurry

 

Up and down the street they run

From morning to the set of sun

I shall be glad when they have done

 

I shall be glad when there’s an end

Of all the noise that doth offend

My soul. Still Night, don cloak, descend.”

 

The pair of spondees in the middle of the final line fall like clods of earth on a coffin lid. Smith’s work is subversive, not of politics or morals but of literary expectations. A diminutive woman, she knowingly donned a girlish costume (in life, in work) that was eccentric in an acceptably British manner. How liberating that must have been, setting her free to be a seriously silly poet. Pompey, the heroine of the first and best of her three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), recalls her understanding of suicide as a little girl. She urges parents to discuss the subject with their children:

 

“So I think every sensitive young child should early learn this. It is a great source of strength and comfort. It is so possible that things may become more than we can bear, is it not? That is not my thought at all. But rather, it is so possible that we may be afraid that things will become more than we can bear. There is a very deadly sort of slave feeling in this thought. For if we think this and become undone by our fear, we may too anxiously placate our fellow-beings, who appear to us to be in more authoritative positions and to have more of power than we over the things that oppress us. But with death as our immediate ally, such thoughts vanish.”

 

I’m not advocating suicide and neither is Smith. I’m not sure it’s even possible to posthumously diagnose Smith (dead at age sixty-eight in 1971) as a depressive. Rather, I think she is forthright and brave and reminds me of the seventeenth-century English prose writers – Sir Thomas Browne, in particular. To put it simply, she understands death as a part of life, as least as important a part as having children. I remember the deaths by suicide of two classmates when I was in grade school. That early exposure to self-destruction has been useful. It never frightened or depressed me.

'Thine Unsuspecting Gratitude and Love'

We’ve had a damp spring and summer in Houston – thirty-nine inches of rain since the start of the year. No major storms but frequent brief showers, often in late afternoon. At this time nine years ago, Hurricane Harvey was about to hit, flooding my car and leaving us without power for four days. Lawns now are lush. Mosquitoes swarm in clouds. Step outside and get sucker-punched by the humidity. Our front garden is a jungle, almost taking over the sidewalk. 

Walter de la Mare published “Dry August Burned” in Memory and Other Poems in 1938, though it suggests the Great War years. August was the time when farmers traditionally burned stubble on their land, causing hares to flee the fire. World War I started in August 1914. The poem begins indoors:

“Dry August burned. A harvest hare

Limp on the kitchen table lay,

Its fur blood-blubbered, eye astare,

While a small child that stood near by

Wept out her heart to see it there.”

 

De la Mare had two daughters and two sons. He was sensitive to the lives of young children, their volatile emotional natures. Sounds attract the girl outside:

 

“. . . like a leveret she ran,

To feast her glistening bird-clear eyes

On a team of field artillery

Gay, to manoeuvres, thudding by.

Spur and gun and limber plate

Flashed in the sun.”

 

A leveret is a young hare. De la Mare describes the girl as “nibbling a green leaf,” like a leveret. She is dazzled by the “sun-tanned soldiery,” the field artillery, the spectacle:

 

“She turned, and ran,

Elf-like, into the house again.

The hare had vanished. . . . ‘Mother,’ she said,

Her tear-stained cheek now flushed with red,

‘Please, may I go and see it skinned?’”

 

Like many of de la Mare’s poems, “Dry August Burned” is a compressed short story, a revelation of character. He suggests even the youngest among us, the most seemingly innocent, knows bloodlust. We are the most savage species.

 

And yet, kindness persists. William Cowper (1731-1800) kept as pets three hares, Puss, Bess and Tiney. A neighboring child who had become bored with them gave them to the poet, who wrote a poem when Tiney died at age nine. When Cowper fed bread to his dog Marquis, he also fed Puss, who lived to the age of twelve. In The Task he writes of Puss:

 

“One sheltered hare

Has never heard the sanguinary yell

Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.

Innocent partner of my peaceful home,

Whom ten long years’ experience of my care

Has made at last familiar, she has lost

Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,

Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.”

 

We suspect some animal lovers of virtue-signaling, wishing to advertise their compassion and sensitivity. One never detects this in Cowper. He could never have lived in London among the crowds and social demands. In Olney he found respite. When Cowper writes of hares and other animals, one senses his identification with these creatures, as in The Task:

   

“Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor

At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw-couch, and slumber unalarmed;

For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged

All that is human in me to protect

Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.

If I survive thee I will dig thy grave,

And when I place thee in it, sighing say,

I knew at least one hare that had a friend.”

'My Poems Sing of Life'

The new century -- no longer new -- has been insatiably consuming good writers. In the early years of the twenty-first we endured a rough patch. In a five-year span we lost Anthony Powell, Edgar Bowers, William Maxwell, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Thomas, Penelope Fitzgerald, C.H. Sisson, Eudora Welty, D.J. Enright, Herbert Morris, Anthony Hecht, Thom Gunn, Donald Justice, Czesław Miłosz, Saul Bellow, Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.

More recently we saw the deaths of Hilton Kramer, Thomas Berger, Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Simon, Geoffrey Hill, Evan S. Connell, Richard Wilbur, Whitney Balliett, Les Murray, Turner Cassity, Helen Pinkerton, Terry Teachout, Robert Conquest, V.S. Naipaul, Norman Podhoretz and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Life and culture are depleted. Now we’re expected to say, “But at least we have their books for consolation.”

 

Add to this sad roll call the name of Clive James, dead in 2019 at age eighty. I had been reading his books for roughly the last twenty years of his life. Most enduring is Cultural Amnesia (2007); perhaps most entertaining, Latest Readings (2015), for what he writes about Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson and Olivia Manning. In 2010, James was diagnosed with emphysema, kidney failure and leukemia, and lived to publish another dozen books (including a translation of Dante) before his death. Much of the poetry he wrote in that final reprieve was devoted to his illness and its reckoning. Published in the Yale Review in April 2017 and collected in that year’s Injury Time was “Declaration of Intent.” In the fourth of its five stanzas he writes:

 

“My poems sing of life. Though death is also there

In how they crystallise an emphasis

Like a tango maestro pausing, they do not despair:

They just acknowledge the abyss

Awaiting us. It brings finality

To what we were. It will do that for me

Soon now. My poems prove that I accepted this.”

'My Unreliable Retrieval System'

Welcome news is so rare in our withered literary culture, we are obligated to celebrate good new work when we encounter it. The summer 2026 issue of New Verse Review has been published, and it includes work by several of our finest established poets, as well as poems by newcomers worth reading. You’ll find three epigrams by R.L. Barth, including “McNamara’s 100,000”: 

“Moronic? Bumbling? Drooling? Poor? Sign here.

There are 100,000 openings

In McNamara’s scheme. You’ll learn some things

You might convert to skills; and never fear,

If under fire you don’t know zig from zag,

Be sure he’ll give you your own body-bag.”

 

Mike Juster’s “Nothing in Hell Is Up to Snuff” is dedicated to his late friend the poet X.J. Kennedy:

 

“It rankles us that Satan doesn’t care

for process. Brimstone shipments are too slow

for summer fun, so flesh is roasted rare,

and He has banished Barry Manilow

without an explanation. Long ago,

He welcomed new arrivals with a show

of evil…not now! He seems unaware

that he is failing as a CEO.

Unshaven, dazed in tattered underwear,

He leaves His pitchfork on His patio,

then curses God without the same old flair.

Though revolution simmers in the air

and demons hatch new schemes for overthrow,

most souls prefer The Devil who they know.”

 

Here is Aaron Poochigian’s “Heliolatry,” a poem that revels in the miracle of photosynthesis:

 

“There are the trees forever doing

a slow, expansive dance

called ‘Reaching Toward the Light.’

 

“Then there’s how shadows keep imbuing

the patterns with askance

and horizontal height.

 

“The whole show, with its matching ways

of moving, points to one

bright source of bud and sprawl.

 

“I close my eyes and tilt my gaze

into the sun, the sun,

the pivot of it all.”

 

And here are two poems by a poet new to me, Adrienne Su. “Solitude” is a meditation on memory, which she describes as “my unreliable / retrieval system.”

'What Are You Selling There – Despair?'

The Night of the Murdered Poets took place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer -- and a fifth, David Bergelson, was a Yiddish novelist. All were Jews – “rootless cosmopolitans,” to use Stalin’s phrase. The others were intellectuals and scientists who had been active in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, organized during World War II by the Soviet government to mobilize world Jewish support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. All were arrested in 1948-49 and endured beatings and torture before their executions. Dovid Margolin writes in “The Exiled Rabbi and the Executed Poet: A Soviet Jewish Story,” published at Chabad.org: 

“After their arrests, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee activists were cruelly interrogated and tortured, with Markish’s treatment among the worst. He was interrogated two or three times a day, questioned all day, and then again from 11:30 p.m. until 5 the next morning, 96 times in all. Under torture at the hands of one of the MGB’s most sadistic officers, Markish signed a confession of guilt (he was accused of treason), effectively signing his own death sentence. On Aug. 12, 1952, after a sham secret trial at which they were all found guilty, 13 of the 15 defendants were executed with a bullet to the back of the head—a crime that has since become known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.”

 

Markish was born in 1895 in Polonnoye, then in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. He served in the Russian army during World War I and published his first collection of avant-garde poems, in Yiddish, in 1919. After a series of pogroms in Ukraine in the early 1920s he moved to Warsaw, where he coedited with novelist I.J. Singer (brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer) an expressionist literary anthology. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 as a celebrator of the Soviet regime. He co-founded the Soviet School of Writers, in 1939 was awarded the Order of Lenin and in 1946 the Stalin Prize.

 

Markish published “Chatyr-Dag” (literally, “Tent Mountain”), named for a massif in Crimea, in 1920, revised and expanded in 1931. This is the opening quatrain from Jordan Finkin’s translation:

 

“Chatyr-Dag. With footsteps marking your wandering paths

I approach the hem of your cloud-patched cloak.

You recluse of stone with almond trees overgrown,

What lapidary tidings do you await from world’s end?”

 

And this from an untitled 1919 poem translated by Amelia Glaser:

 

“Hey, what do you deal in – sorrow?

What are you selling there – despair?”

Nadezhda Mandelstam in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), in a chapter titled “The Wandering Jew,” writes: “A remarkable thing about the Jews is that, apart from suffering the lot of their own people, they also have to share the misfortunes of those in whose country they have put up their tents. Even a Jew who publicly renounces his Jewishness still goes to the gas chambers with the others, or is sent to Kolyma, like any member of the alien tribe whose language he speaks.”

 

On November 22, 1955, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR ruled there had been “no substance to the charges” against Markish and the other defendants and closed the case.