Description
Book SynopsisRenowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.
Trade Review"Charles Martin's new book, Signs & Wonders, is elegant and powerful. Past and present commingle as he writes poems of contemporary life in traditional form, and with a remarkable range: 'Poem for the Millennium' in accentual verse, and one of the best 9/11 poems we have in terza rima. Taking his cue from Catullus and Ovid, whose work he has brilliantly translated, Martin creates his own new vision of the world in language of praise with an underlying tone of combined horror and awe." (Grace Schulman) "As Signs & Wonders demonstrates so triumphantly, you'd have a hard time to find better contemporary poems than Charles Martin's. I can only be grateful for 'Ovid to His Book,' 'Support,' 'Poem for the Millennium,; 'Near Jeffrey's Hook,' 'After 9/11,' 'Poison,' and many more. Martin does not merely write well-made, shapely poems; he charges them with energy. I'm placing my bet that they will last." (X. J. Kennedy) "Like an expert cellist in full control of phrasing and intonation, he can make a line of metrical verse sonorous or playful, tenebrous or scintillating, elegiac or mercurial." (David Yezzi)"
Table of ContentsDirections for Assembly
I. The Life in Letters
The Flower Thief
Souvenir
Some Kind of Happiness
The Sacred Monsters
Words to Utter at Nightfall
Mind in the Trees
Autopsychography
Support
East Side, West Side
1. Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid
2. John Koch at the New-York Historical Society: The Party
To Himself
Brooklyn in the Seventies
This Organizing Solitude
This Organizing Solitude
Theory Victorious
II. Some Romans
On a Roman Perfume Bottle
Ava Pacis
Ovid to His Book
Three Sonnets from the Romanesco of G.G. Belli
1. The Good Soldiers
2. The Spaniard
3. The Coffee House Philosopher
III. Near Jeffrey's Hook
The Twentieth Century in Photographs
Poem for the Millennium
Who Knows What's Best?
Getting Carded
For the End of the Age of Irony
Near Jeffrey's Hook
Foreboding
After 9/11
After Wang Wei
Poison
Acknowledgments
