[David Rosenthal]

I like Martin, and I have seen this and admired it before. I appreciate the personal reflection in the commentary, and what strikes me is how well this poem pushes thinking for the faithful and faithless (me) alike. The first two lines of S2 are political tough stuff presented in a perfect tone. Michael is of course right on the money that this is a hard feat to pull off -- it is the sort of thing that fails if it is 99% there. Very impressive.

David R.

[John Whitworth]

hank you, Michael and others. Why have I heard of Ashbery and Jorie Graham and not this guy? I shall pursue his poems on hte net and maybe invest in a book. Is there a good Selected. My thirty quid on George Starbuck was well spent, but perhaps something cheaper?

[Charlotte Innes]

John,

Check out Charles Martin's selected, "Starting from Sleep" on Amazon US. Here's the link.

And here's the link on Amazon UK.

Amazingly cheap on the UK site for some reason!

Charlotte

[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks for the tip, Charlotte. I just bought a copy for $8 including postage. (I see it's cheap on U.S. Amazon, too.)

[Tim Murphy]

It's a superb book, a book to read alongside Sam's selected, No Word of Farewell. And that's saying a lot.

[Christopher ONeill]

Of all the pieces submitted, this gave me the most trouble to get my head around. Since one of the things I look for in a poem is a challenge, my difficulty with the piece is overall a good thing.

I was aware of Charles Martin as a translator with a rather specific gift (his versions of Catullus make me look at the originals differently). But this is the first of his original poems which has really engaged me.

Formally, it is a masterpiece - as several other contributors have observed. The way that the metre is nearly iambic pentameter - but won't commit - seemed to me particularly fine. On the one hand the metre's imprecision highlights the conscious inexactitude of the language (line 5/6 use euphemism to convey horror as effectively as anything I can think of in Larkin); on the other hand, Martin leaves an opening for the Gilbert and Sullivan anapests of his first line (which foregrounds the banality of evil impressively).

The religious dimension is not working for me - yet. I can't easily reconcile viewing these very real deaths in mythological terms, and I find my perplexment heightened by the near archaism 'give them the lie'. I don't know if this will be a permanent problem for me with the poem (as I said, I'm taking time over digesting this one); but even if I can't access this specific dimension of the poem, there is more than enough other stuff going on to keep me glued to the sonnet.

And apart from anything else: this poem shows how powerful form can be when you don't quite observe it. This sonnet uses its not quite form to unsettle my expectations; unsettled expectations listen more keenly.

This is the most challenging poem I've met out of this bunch; it may yet be the aspect of this exercise which stays with me longest.

There are one or two poems on the list I love more, I suspect I shall always love them more.

But this was the poem which was most news to me.

[Bill Carpenter]

FYI, this poem is placed at the head of Dick Allen's essay on Expansive Poetry as characteristic of the Expansive Poetry movement, along with an excerpt from Fred Turner's The New World and Mary Jo Salter's Welcome to Hiroshima.

http://www.expansivepoetryonline.com...l/culttwo.html

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for that link, Bill. I confess that on my own I wouldn't have linked the term "expansive" with this very condensed sonnet, but the essay's a useful indicator of the way others are using the term.

I think everybody around here has probably seen my review of Charles Martin's Signs and Wonders, but here's a link just in case.