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Bewilderment: New Poems And Translations (2012)

by David Ferry(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0226244881 (ISBN13: 9780226244884)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

University Of Chicago Press

review 1: I just finished this, and quite frankly am feeling wiped out by its expressions of loneliness and isolation, which I recognize all too well. Especially at this moment of my life. Perhaps it was not the best thing to read. But I can't stop recommending it. Moment after moment of beauty, profound humanity, connection, alienation, dignity, love, admiration, sadness, the timelessness of specificity, the nobility of the human need to share and weep, lament and mourn. Futility and dignity. I'm babbling.A quick note of how grateful I am to have studied with the English faculty at Wellesley in the 1980s. I was not an English major and am not a writer or poet, but I do feel my sensibility deepened as a result of studying with Frank Bidart, David Ferry, and Arthur Gold. And ... morelearning from Robert Polito, the new Director of the Poetry Society of America (or Poetry Foundation, I forget the exact title). I may not create anything, but I do appreciate. BEWILDERMENT I truly appreciated.
review 2: I was really intrigued by the way Ferry arranges his poems, so that one poem by Fery responds to or analyzes another poem, either one he has translated here (from Virgil, for example) or else a poem by his friend (?) Arthur Gold that he packs into his own poem. In essence, Ferry's poems are often sort of poetic essays, reading and interpreting the poems he is talking about, and he finds intriguing dimensions in the poems that I hadn't considered before. So, as a thinker about poetry, Ferry has a lot of interest to say.The themes of the poems themselves are concerned with death and dying-- it's hard not to see this as a response to Ferry's age and looming mortality, as morbid as it is to say something like that. There are some moving poems, early in the book especially, about his wife's passing. But overall, emotionally, Ferry isn't where I am: I am capable, I should hope, of empathizing with someone in Ferry's stage of life. But the appeal of these poems, I think, isn't meant to move you in that way, and for me at least, it didn't. less

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