[Tim Murphy]

Mr. Hecht will be our guest on the Lariat board this weekend. He doesn't use a computer, but he will respond to posted questions by fax. At age 79 he has published a new book, The Darkness and the Light, which I found just devastating. I have always been dimly aware that he was a major figure, but reading his new book sent me back to re-read all his earlier ones. Dipping into The Hard Hours, which won the Pulitzer, I found a forty-something poet who sounded alternately like Yeats, like Auden, like Stevens. Always brilliant, always in perfect formal command, but how should I put it? Always influenced. Thirty years later all those literary trappings have disappeared, and I hope all of you will read this book and avail yourselves of the opportunity to query this great man. Here is a thumbnail review of the book I posted on Amazon:

Twenty-five years ago the novelist John Fowles published a truly silly essay in which he argued that lyric poetry is the exclusive province of the young. He cited Keats and Shelley to make his point. I was just a kid when I read it, but my reaction was "Shoemaker, stick to your lath." Among the lyric poets I most admired were Pindar and Po Chu-I, Horace and Hardy, men who had done extraordinary work into their eighties. Even then I longed for the reflections of those who "spit into the teeth of Time that has transfigured me," in Yeats' memorable phrase.

With the appearance of The Darkness and the Light, I have another great old man to read. Here are one of the half-dozen greatest villanelles in our language, the most vicious, wittiest flyting since Burns sank beneath the sod, the "Sarabande at Age 77," and the title poem, which I first read one week after my octogenarian father succumbed in the wan, morning light. Fellow Amazonians, I'd say this is the most important book of English verse to appear since Wilbur gave us his collected poems in 1988. Buy it. Read it. Memorize it.

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim:
For some reason I was a little slow to warm to Hecht's new book, but I have come to feel that all you say about it is true. There are such heaps of mediocre poetry out there, literally hundreds of volumes a year that publishers send for possible review, that one begins to wonder if there are any criteria at all for quality. I find myself getting sloppy in my reading, not expecting much and so not risking much, failing to engage. Then a book like this comes along and I realize with joy that there IS such a thing as quality -- and realize with joy that I can still recognize it!
RPW

[Tim Murphy]

Between The Lines is a small British house which publishes extraordinary, book-length interviews with senior poets, including Wilbur, Justic, Heaney, Hecht, etc. The book in which my British publisher, Philip Hoy, interviews Hecht, is probably the best of a fine lot. You can read extracts from the Hecht book and the others at www.interviews-with-poets.com