In June Mr. Hecht published a book, The Darkness and the Light, which has been slammed by idiots like Wm. Logan, but which has astonished many of his fans. Hecht has long been among America's best poets, but I think that in this volume he's really gone beyond his previous level and laid claim to Alicia's capital G. Here's:

Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven

...."The harbingers are come. See, see their mark,
....White is their colour, and behold my head."

Long gone the smoke and pepper childhood smell
Of the smouldering immolation of the year,
Leaf-strewn in scattered grandeur where it fell,
Golden and poxed with frost, tarnished and sere.

And I myself have whitened as the weathers
Of heaped-up Januarys as they bequeath
The annual rings and wrongs that wring my withers,
Sober my thoughts and undermine my teeth.

The dramatis personae of our lives
Dwindle and wizen; familiar boyhood shames,
The tribulations one somehow survives,
Rise smokily from propitiatory flames

Of our forgetfulness until we find
It becomes strangely easy to forgive
Even ourselves with this clouding of the mind,
This cinerous blur and smudge in which we live.

A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,
The stately dance advances; these are airs
Bone-deep and numbing I should know by now,
Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs.


If you folks like this as much as I, I'd be happy to type in a few more favorites from this remarkable new book.

Yes, I would like to see more of his work. Hard to get a sense of his writing from just one poem.

Thanks!

nyctom

Hi Tim,

As one about to turn 73, this poem of Hecht's wrings all too true, and wonderfully so.

Don't know about capital G (if it means Great) as I am, so far, unwilling to allow that to any English-language poet alive since Frost. How about capital VVG (Very, Very Good)?

Do please post more of Hecht that you particularly like.

G.

Glad you fellows liked the Sarabande. Here's the title poem, which Professor Hecht sent me a few days after my father died last fall.

"The Darkness and the Light
Are Both Alike to Thee"

--Psalms 139:12

Like trailing silks, the light
Hangs in the olive trees
As the pale wine of day
Drains to its very lees:
Huge presences of gray
Rise up, and then it's night.

Distantly lights go on.
Scattered like fallen sparks
Bedded in peat, they seem
Set in the plushest darks
Until a timid gleam
Of matins turns them wan,

Like the elderly and frail
Who've lasted through the night,
Cold brows and silent lips,
For whom the rising light
Entails their own eclipse,
Brightening as they fail.

I like both these poems -- the second one is more accessible than the first. However, his sentence structure is sometimes wobbly. The final stanza of The Darkness and the Light isn't a properly constructed sentence -- no discernable subject/verb. That's something that always makes me uncomfortable.

Caleb, Welcome back. The second stanza ends with a comma, not a period. So the final stanza is an elegant simile appended to the subject and verb in the previous stanza "they seem/ Set in the plushest darks." The elderly and frail grow wan and die in the morning light, just as my father did. Just as the bright lights in the night grow wan in the light of dawn. There is nothing clumsy or ungrammatical, only extraordinary syntactical intricacy. Or shall we call it Mastery? For decades I have assaulted the ramparts of iambic trimeter, and Tony's performance in constructing so elaborate a metaphor, in so extended a sentence, boggles my mind. And reminds me anew how much I have to learn about the wielding of our language.

This is the poem of an old man who has sat at death's bed side, and seen what I saw last fall, the light that invests the faces of the dying. A man who walks with the aid of a stick and has suffered invasive surgery on heart and lungs. In his infirmity he has given us this book of which this poem is the capstone--but it must be appreciated in the context of the whole book, which it ends and lends its title to. When I first read TD&tL, I carefully reread all of Hecht. And I cannot tell you much I profited by my reading.

As Shakespeare says at the end of Lear, "We who are young/ Shall never see so much nor live so long." Tonight I'll post more Hecht.

My goodness, I can't believe that I didn't see that comma -- I was certain I saw a period at the end of the second stanza! I must have not had my glasses on. That being the case, I am certainly wrong in what I said.

Hecht is a poet I would like to have for my site, but I haven't approached him because I assumed I wouldn't be able to get his poems without reprint fees. But if he is old and frail, perhaps I should approach him now while I still have the chance.

------------------
Caleb
www.poemtree.com

Thanks, Tim, for posting these. Hecht is one of those poets I keep meaning to read more of and get to know better. I have only one book, believe it or not, the Venetian Vespers. So I'll definitely put The Darkness and the Light on my list of books to buy next time am Stateside. In the past, I must confess, the Hecht poems I have run across have tended to spark admiration in me for their craftsmanship--but from a cool distance, as a polished marble monument. But I am always willing to be converted. How bout one more?

Mr. Hecht is right up my street. That trimeter piece
is fantastico.

DC

P.S.
And one more please...


[This message has been edited by conny (edited November 06, 2001).]

Alicia, Here's an exercise in slant rhyme. Hecht fought his way across Europe in the infantry and, a Jew, was present at the liberation of one of the concentration camps.

Haman

I am Haman the hangman, the engineer
And chief designer of that noble structure,
The Gallows. Let the Jews tremble and beware:
I have made preparations for their capture
And extirpation in a holy war
Against their foolish faith, their hateful culture,
An ethnic cleansing which will leave us pure,
Ridding the world of this revolting creature.
I shall have camps, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' the lure
Of hope, the chastening penalty of torture,
And other entertainments of despair,
The which I hanker after like a lecher.
And best of all the gibbet, my friend, my poor
One-armed assistant, in stiff, obedient posture,
Like a young officer's salute, but more
Rigid, and more instructive than a lecture,
Saying "I can teach you to tread on air
And add another cubit to your stature."

I wrote Tony last night and told him we were discussing his work, and he has graciously assented to field our questions on the Lariat Board this weekend. He doesn't use a computer, but he has a fax for swift response. This is an outstanding opportunity to query one of best poets of the century, so go ahead and post questions (after you get his books from any library or bookstore). So, post away, and early next week I shall type in his responses. I'll also post a brief review of Darkness and Light on Richard's Discerning Eye board. And I'll post more poems as this discussion evolves.

Of these three I like "Darkness and Light..." best; that's the one that makes me want to read more. Thanks, Tim.

Tim:
Thanks for posting these unforgettable poems -- and for soliciting Mr. Hecht's participation here.
Among the many things to like in these poems is the sinuous movement from line to line. He often makes his phrases lie in discreet lines, but when they run on -- breaking, for example, between subjects and verbs or between nouns and modifiers -- the words that come at the line ends nevertheless are up to bearing the weight of their position.
Richard

Richard, I'm pleased to see that Hecht has brought you round. Having posted a tour-de-force in slant/rhyme (Alicia's passion), let me share a spectacular piece of slant/rhymed loose iambics (Tim's present fascination.)

Secrets

"The number of witches and sorceresses has everywhere become enormous." --John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, 1559

When they fly through the air they turn invisible
But may sometimes be spotted by patient birding questers
At the witching hour in woods on the darkest possible
Moonless nights at the regular secret musters
Of their kindred spirits, these horrible Weird Sisters.

It is widely believed that lust is their ruling passion,
A legacy maybe of Puritan tradition,
Or because they are ugly, for they use some glutinous poison
To lure young farmhands into abject submission
Or orgies of loose sabbatical possession.

For their foul rites they render the fat of babies;
Spider and warted toad mix in their simples;
Heartless they are, and death is among their hobbies;
Nothing on earth is vile as their mildest foibles,
Cold as their tits, delicate as their thimbles.

Tim, add my thanks to the chorus. I have the book and am knocked out by his classical coolness. Wow.

------------------
Ralph

I am a sucker for just this sort of slant rime. I particularly like "simples" and "thimbles"...

Aliki, I knew you'd fall for simples/thimbles. I think babies/ hobbies/ foibles are equally miraculous. As are the extended off rhymes throughout Haman. Hecht is our master of the macabre--witness these poems I've posted. But there is light in this volume, and I wish to offer up one of the translations from Horace in this volume, for the particular delectation of our moderatrix.

A Prayer to Twin Divinities

Let the girls sing of Diana in joyful praise
And the boys of her twin, Apollo unshorn, shall sing
And honor their sacred mother, whom Jupiter, king
Of gods, so favored, honor with song and the bays.

Of Diana let the girls sing, goddess of streams
Who loves the icy mountain, the darkened leafage
Of the Erymanthian woods, the brighter boscage
Of Lycian heights, young girls, give her your hymns.

To Tempe, to Phoebus Apollo's native isle
Give praise, you boys, and praise many times over
His godly shoulder slung with both lyre and quiver,
His brother's instrument, his festive, sacred soil.

Hearing your prayers, Apollo, god-begotten,
Will fend off war and plague and ill omen
From Caesar and his people, and banish famine
To the lands of the barbarous Parthian and Briton.

Thanks, Tim, for posting these, though they made me kick myself for having the book in my hands at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago and putting it back down. If only I'd read these three poems. Next trip to the bookstore.

Paul Lake

Dear Paul, I appreciate your brief comment. It's a surprising book, not one readily to be apprehended at a Noble Barns bookmart. I have a habit of checking in pencil the really first rate poems in a volume of verse. I think I've 18 such marks in this book, 18 in The Tower (Yeats), 18 in A Further Range (Frost), and 19 in Poems of 1912-1913 (Hardy). And Wiley, that's why I'm thinking that a hundred years from now, our successors may value Mr. Hecht as highly as I am beginning to do. I suggest that all Spherians acquire and peruse this volume.

Tim, I just saw tonight Anthony Hecht added as a new member. HOW DID YOU MANAGE THAT with someone who doesn't use a computer? Never mind how. The fact that he is available and may comment here is fantastic.

Tim--
Thanks a lot for posting these--I found the first one particularly amazing. I'm going back and re-reading Collected Earlier Poems, and putting the new book on my Christmas list.
Tony

Between The Lines is a small British house which publishes extraordinary, book-length interviews with senior poets, including Wilbur, Justice, Gunn, Heaney, Hecht, etc. The book in which 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. Simply click the thumbnail picture of the poet you want to read.

OK, Mastery fans, please post your questions by tomorrow evening, and I'll print them and fax them to Mr. Hecht. His answers will appear around Monday. With his having no access to a computer, we can't have the give and take we've had with previous guest Lariats, but we can all discuss his answers afterward. If this works well, the convenience store downslope from Wilbur's aerie in the Berkshires has a fax, and we'll repeat the experiment with Dick.

Here are some questions to get people started:

--Who are your favorite poets?

--Which poems of yours are your personal favorites and why?

--What do you feel about reaction to your newest book? Has it been unfairly criticized, or has reaction ranged across the board?

--How do subjects of your poems present themselves to you, and how long do you spend revising them?

--How do you know when you have reached a point of diminishing returns when editing/rewriting a piece?

--How long do you wait to return to a piece before revising (or reinstating previous drafts)?

--At what point do you decide to toss it onto the bone pile?

--How often do you go back to the bone pile and either try to scrounge for something useful in a current piece you are writing or try to resurrect something completely?

--If you can pinpoint it-when was your first major experience with language?

--How many poems did you write before you felt you had written a successful piece? What did you think made it successful?

--Which is more important to you—sound or sense?

Hecht uses slant-rhymed bisyllables with extraordinary deftness in "Haman" and other poems. I would like to ask the master whether he has any general principles or preferences for the use of slant rhyme.

A.S.

Here's one last Hecht poem before his visit this weekend. He explains in a note that it was common knowledge in the middle ages that the Mandrake sprouted from the semen of hanged men, that witches made love potions of it, that its shriek when pulled from the ground could drive one insane.

The Hanging Gardens of Tyburn

Mysteriously fed by the dying breath
Of felons, by the foul odor that melts
Down from their bodies hanging on the gallows,
The rank, limp fesh, the soft pendulous guilt,

This solitary plant takes root at night,
Its tiny charnel blossoms the pale blue
Of Pluto's ice pavilions; being dried,
Powdered and mixed with the cold morning dew

From the left hand of an executed man,
It confers untroubled sleep, and can prevent
Prenatal malformations if applied
To a woman's swelling body, except in Lent.

Take care to clip only the little blossoms,
For the plant, uprooted, utters a cry of pain
So highly pitched as both to break the eardrum
And render the would-be harvester insane.

I`d like to ask if WW2 is still ever far from
his thoughts. And how he sees his own work, and
the work of other poets, in relation to
barbarism (For want of a better word)and deceit.
Is it his job to explain the world or to make it
a better place ?

DC

Conny, Click into the url for that interview by Phil Hoy. We were all astonished that he spoke so frankly, and that's what makes it the best book in the series. The horror, the horror. Having read it, I doubt that you could better rephrase your question, though you're welcome to try, and I shall forward it to Professor Hecht. --Tim

Sorry, I unintentionally started a thread on slant rime. My question is meant for this thread on Anthony Hecht.

Is there a dictionary of slant rimes?

Bob

Tim,

I followed up on your suggestion to look at the Hoy interview, or excerpts from it, and I am rather sorry that I did so. Probably those excerpts are too selective to give a full picture of the poet as a man, but so far as they go they show Hecht to be less than admirable. It disappointing to find that an accomplished poet is, or has been, by his own confession, a cowardly and unpatriotic individual.

The old Sir Walter Scott verses come to mind: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead...etc."

Having seen a good deal of ground action in the nearly forgotten Korean War, I believe have observed American soldiers and marines under fire quite enough to know that surly, insubordinate attitudes, much less outright cowardice, are not common among them.

This discovery concerning Hecht may henceforth make it as hard for me to enjoy his poetry as it must be for you to appreciate even the better poems of, say, Leo Y.


G.



[This message has been edited by Golias (edited November 11, 2001).]

Dear Wiley, I've not been in the armed forces, let alone a combatant, so I'm no one to judge a soldier. Tony saw members of his unit machine-gun a party of women and children under a flag of truce and frankly expressed his horror at it. Like many other intellectuals he subsequently became utterly disillusioned by our government's conduct of the Vietnam war. This hardly makes him cowardly or unpatriotic. I suggest you read the entire book if you want a fuller picture of this admirable man. As for Korea, I just watched a spectacular documentary hosted by Colonel North on the retreat from that frozen reservoir, and I salute the gallantry of you and your comrades-in-arms. It is not forgotten.

I found a web page claiming to have a slant rhyme dictionary, though I haven't checked it out yet to see if it's any good: http://lyricpro.com/LyricProSlantRhymes.htm

Personally, I'm skeptical it can be very good. Some slant rhymes are rather easy to spot, like spot and spit, but then we encounter judgment calls, like sport and spate and spud and speed, etc. And if the same rhyming words are used more than twice, each succeeding use of slant rhyme may be a slant rhyme for the preceding one but may grow very distant from the first use. spot spit sport spat spud speed sped, etc., for example, in which you may agree with each succeeding slant rhyme but may not agree that spot and sped are "true" slant rhymes. This is off the top of my head. I'm sure there are better examples of what I'm saying.

When we were younger, Alan and I used Clement Wood's invaluable rhyme dictionary. Unfortunately, it has now been rewritten and reissued by the appropriately named Ronald Bogus. So those of you in search of a good one, search the used book stores. I didn't pass this question on to Mr. Hecht, because the answer seems obvious. If you seek slant rhymes for omen, look up women, shaman, semen, daimon, lemon, etc. Alan once asked Dick Wilbur if he employed a rhyme dictionary, and he ruefully grinned and confessed: "No, I'm afraid that after all this time I AM a rhyme dictionary." I suspect that Mr. Hecht would respond in like fashion.

Thought I should bump this up to the top of the board in view of our friend's demise.

Tim
When an American/Australian friend was flying home for a visit she asked me what I wanted her to bring me. I said "The Darkness and the Light" by Anthony Hecht, and she did bring it to me. Since then I have managed to get a copy of "Flight Among the Tombs".
I had an argument with my local library because they didn't have any of his work.
He has that something extra which marks a timeless poet and yet he is very much a man of his time.

I edited back in because I noticed I said "is" instead of "was". I still say "is".

Janet

This Dirda on Hecht was posted on another forum and I thought it might be of interest here.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited October 22, 2004).]

A consolation for Tim.

An excerpt from Hoy's interview with Anthony Hecht:
" Hecht:...when you ask, 'why would a boy stand for hours in front of a scene of great bitterness?' the answer is, of course, that he does not do so willingly; he is compelled to. And he is compelled to because no one comes to take him away from all this barrenness. You are perfectly right to see arid and defeated landscapes cropping up in a good number of my poems, as is the case with certain winter scenes of Breughel. They were for me a means to express a desolation of the soul. There are such scenes in Hardy, as well as in a fine young poet, not yet well known, named Timothy Murphy. May I quote a short poem of his?

Twice Cursed
Bristling with fallen trees
and choked with broken ice
the river threatens the house.
I'll wind up planting rice
if the spring rains don't cease.
What ancestral curse
prompts me to farm and worse,
convert my woes to verse?


I'm not a farmer, and thus not subject to their special dangers, but for me a bleak and forlorn landscape can assemble and convey a deep sense of despair."
interview

conversation with Hecht

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited October 22, 2004).]

It is interesting that he uses the word "despair" to indicate the emotional quality of "bleak and forlorn landscapes" - objective correlatives of "a desolation of the soul." But it doesn't really matter what you call it, the fact is we poets need this state like fish need water. But I would say that this sense of "a desolation of the soul" is the experience of the soul itself. Many mystics have said so.

As Evelyn Underhill writes:

Eckhart says of this "desert" state of being:

And the psychologist, James Hillman:

.

I have always read that desolate passage from the Hecht poem as the soul's nostalgia for its homeland, rather than a terrible experience forced upon a child which has now scarred him for life. Today, in our present culture, this experience is mostly treated as a pathology to be cured by drugs. But I see this desolation experience as the source of all creativity. For me, the word "despair" is what the ego calls its struggles to extricate itself from this state. No resistance, no despair.

------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited October 23, 2004).]

This was the first Hecht poem I believe I ever read. R.I.P.


PROSPECTS
by Anthony Hecht


We have set out from here for the sublime
Pastures of summer shade and mountain stream;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.

Is all the green of that enamelled prime
A snapshot recollection or a dream?
We have set out from here for the sublime

Without provisions, without one thin dime,
And yet, for all our clumsiness, I deem
It certain that we shall arrive on time.

No guidebook tells you if you'll have to climb
Or swim. However foolish we may seem,
We have set out from here for the sublime

And must get past the scene of an old crime
Before we falter and run out of steam,
Riddled by doubt that we'll arrive on time.

Yet even in winter a pale paradigm
Of birdsong utters its obsessive theme.
We have set out from here for the sublime;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.

Finally the Sydney Morning Herald has published an obituary for Anthony Hecht. I think it's rather a good blend of various obituaries.



Sorry. The page is" not found". I'll go back to source and see what I can do.
No the link won't post so here it is. The Sydney Morning Herald will forgive me I'm sure. If they read this they should forgive a serious poetry forum for respecting them sufficiently to use their obituary:
________

Confronting last century's horrors

November 2, 2004


Anthony Hecht, Poet, 1923-2004



Anthony Hecht, one of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, has died aged 81. Hecht's work combined a passionate interest in form with an unflinching determination to confront the horrors of 20th-century history, in particular World War II, in which he fought, and the Holocaust.

He was born in New York to parents of German-Jewish ancestry. Hecht defined his family as "upper-middle-class", but his father's reckless business ventures and the 1929 crash made him feel the family was always poised to plunge down the financial and social scale.


While studying English at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, he decided he wanted to become a poet, an ambition his parents tried to discourage: they delegated a family friend, Ted Geisel, better known by his pen name of Dr Seuss, to dissuade him from pursuing this vocation, to no avail.


After three years at Bard, Hecht was drafted into the 97th Infantry Division and sent to Europe. The horrific experiences of war permeate many of his most moving poems. His division helped liberate Flossenburg, a concentration camp near Buchenwald, where the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died. Hecht was instructed to interview inmates in the hope of assembling evidence with which to try the camp commanders. He later commented: "The place, the suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking."


On his return to America, Hecht took advantage of the GI Bill to study with the poet-critic John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. He soon met fellow poets such as Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop.


His first collection, A Summoning of Stones, (1954) revealed his mastery of a complex range of forms and an impassioned awareness of the forces of history. His poetry has often been compared with that of W.H. Auden, with whom he became friends during a stay in 1951 on Ischia, where Auden spent each summer. In 1993 he published The Hidden Law, a critical reading of Auden's oeuvre.


Hecht soon won many admirers, and prizes, including the Prix de Rome in 1951 and a Pulitzer in 1968 for The Hard Hours. It was in this volume that Hecht began to explore his memories of the war - memories so potent they had resulted in a nervous breakdown in 1959. Hecht spent three months in hospital, but unlike Sylvia Plath, whom he had met at Smith College, he was spared electric shock therapy.


The long poem Rites and Ceremonies is Hecht's most disturbing response to the Holocaust:

But in the camps, one can look through a huge square
Window, like an aquarium, upon a room
The size of my livingroom filled with human hair ...
Out of one trainload, about five hundred in all,
Twenty the next morning were hopelessly insane.
And some there be that have no memorial,
That are perished as though they had never been.
Made into soap.

In comparison with his hero, Auden, Hecht wrote slowly and relatively little: in the course of a 60-year career, he published only seven collections of poetry, and his complete works would fill only 500 pages.

His poetry reflects his erudition. He earned his living as a teacher of poetry, principally at the University of Rochester, where he was John H. Deane professor of poetry and rhetoric, but he also had stints at Smith, Bard, Harvard, Georgetown and Yale. His poetry shows itself aware of the traditions of European and American poetry, but also concerns itself with other art forms, in particular painting and architecture.

The title poem of his 1979 volume, The Venetian Vespers, is a monologue spoken by a "mentally unsound" American who has settled in Venice in the hope of escaping his memories of the war. Hecht plays off his suffering and stoic resolve against the city's decay, dignity, beauty and history.

It is easy to ignore the suave, humorous side of Hecht. He created much of his most enjoyable work by updating the classics, for example reworking Horace's odes as though the Latin author were a mooching Manhattanite. And he is excellent value in a poem such as The Ghost in the Martini, in which the poet's ego and id have a row just as he is about to make a pass at a woman much younger than himself; or one of his best-known pieces, The Dover Bitch. Here, in the language of Holden Caulfield, he pities the woman who features in Matthew Arnold's poem: "To have been brought/ All the way down from London, and then be addressed/ As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort/ Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty."


He abjured performance poets, wrote uninhibitedly on the old theme of female mutability, and rounded on feminist academics by imagining them in heaven, "Feasting off dead white European males, / Or local living ones, if all else fails".


Hecht's poetry will stand, alongside that of James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, John Hollander and Richard Howard, as exemplifying the virtues of a commitment to the formal that produced some of the finest American poetry of the 20th century. His work has also been influential on younger poets such as Brad Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter and J.D. McClatchy.


He was the recipient of almost every honour in American poetry including the Bollingen Prize (1983), the Tanning Prize (1997), and the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal (2000).

He is survived by his second wife, the cookery writer and interior designer Helen D'Alessandro, and their son, and two sons from his first marriage.

The Guardian; The Telegraph, London




T

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 04, 2004).]

Tuesday, Election Day, was gloriously sunny here in Berkeley. Wednesday it rained. Thursday, today, it's simply cold. It's so strange to see the pathetic fallacy at work in regular life.

Anyway, today I was thinking of Hecht, and this one out of 1977's Millions of Strange Shadows:

An Autumnal


The lichens, like a gorgeous, soft disease
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTIn rust and gold rosette
Emboss the bouldered wall, and creepers seize
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTIn their cup-footed fret,

Ravelled and bare, such purchase as affords.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe sap-tide slides to ebb,
And leafstems, like the drumsticks of small birds,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTLie snagged in a spiderweb.

Down at the stonework base, among the stump-
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTFungus and feather moss,
Dead leaves are sunken in a shallow sump
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTOf energy and loss,

Enriched now with the colors of old coins
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd brilliance of wet leather.
An earthen tea distills at the roots-groins
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTInto the smoky weather

A deep, familiar essence of the year:
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTA sweet fetor, a ghost
Of foison, gently welcoming us near
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTTo humus, mulch, compost.

The last mosquitoes lazily hum and play
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAbove the yeasting earth
A feeble Gloria to this cool decay
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTOr casual dirge of birth.

A Letter (probably very well known to Hecht readers) is one I like very much. The indents are fiddly to reproduce, so I include this link to the poem: http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/94_95/hecht.html

That Australian obituary above mentions some of Hecht’s lighter work but omits to say that he was the co-inventor, with John Hollander, of the double dactyl. Or perhaps (as I believe Hollander maintained) Hecht invented the form and they both publicised it. On another board recently I came across a (near) double-dactyl to Hecht. Its author acknowledges that he didn't strictly follow the form, and this set me thinking. I came up with this, which I trust will seem appropriate rather than irreverent.

Hactylus dactylus,
Anthony Hecht is all
done now with crocuses,
finished with death:

done with the sliding of
sea in the moonlight, the
blood’s repetitions, which
end with the breath.



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited November 04, 2004).]

Henry, I like it so
much I will buy
it if ever I find
it on sale in a
bookshop.


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Mark Allinson