MAYFLIES

Eleven years have passed since Richard Wilbur won his second Pulitzer Prize for New and Collected Poems. In the years

that followed, devotees of his formalist verse have scoured poetry periodicals to find the former US Poet Laureate’s sporadically published poetry. The 26 original poems and translations collected in this new volume live up to the expectations that follow such a celebrated master, and they treat readers to the pleasures of self-consciously crafted lyric verse. Thematically, the poems are loosely linked together by explorations of the paradoxical relationship between the comfortable stability of memory and the imperative uncertainty of the present moment. Wilbur’s expert versification reveals this mystery to be part of everyday experience: “This Pleasing Anxious Being” mines the memories of childhood to grasp for fleeting moments of security, while “Icons” searches for permanence behind the carefully constructed images of celebrities. The lyric translations of French, Romanian, and Bulgarian poets also echo this theme, perhaps most poignantly in Valeri Petrov’s struggle with memories of friends hanged by the Nazis during WWII. In addition to the lyric translations, carefully crafted translations of MoliSþre’s prologue to Amphitryon and a canto of Dante’s Inferno are presented. The title poem suggests that the joyful capture of these transcendent moments is the poet’s calling, and here, to the great delight of his readers, Wilbur once again demonstrates his mastery of seeing and reproducing such moments. The graceful combination of virtuoso formal verse and fully matured wisdom produces a tightly woven group of poems and

translations that reinforce Wilbur’s standing as one of the great poetic craftsmen of the 20th century.