A note about Mayflies

In 1989 Richard Wilbur published his New and Collected Poems, a landmark volume which won that year's Pulitzer Prize. Eleven years later, he published the first edition of Mayflies, which gathered together all of the poetry he had written in years following his New and Collected, and added a number of translations, from Mallarmé, Cassian, Petrov, Baudelaire, Molière and Dante. The Waywiser Press's edition of Mayflies is a significantly expanded volume, which adds eleven new poems to the twenty-five which appeared in the American edition: "The Reader", "Sir David Brewster's Toy", "Man Running", "Asides", "Tanka", "In Trackless Woods", "Twelve Riddles from Symphosius", "An Eightieth-Birthday Ballade for Anthony Hecht", "To a Comedian", "Blackberries for Amelia", and "Green".

A note on Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921. His books of poetry include New and Collected Poems (1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (1961); Things of This World (1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Ceremony and Other Poems (1950); and The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947). He has also published numerous translations of French plays, two books for children, and a collection of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (1959). His The Catbird's Song: Prose Pieces is due this spring from Harcourt Brace. Among his honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, the T. S. Eliot Award, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, he lives in Cummington, Massachusetts.

Praise for Mayflies

"May the voice of this sure-thinking, clear-sighted poet of uncertainties, with his balanced vision of ineluctable shadow and undiscouraged shining (to borrow Auden's phrase about Freud), remain with us well into the new century. Wilbur's work embraces the rich exchange of pleasure and reward that accompanies the writing and receiving of great poetry. In his own words, 'There's nothing so wonderful as having constructed something perfectly arbitrary, without any help from anybody else, out of pure delight and self-delight, and then to find out that it turns out to be useful to a few others. You have it both ways, if you're lucky: you do exactly as you want to do, you're as lonely and as happy as a child playing with his toy trains, and then it turns out that people are grateful to you ...' Wilbur has been lucky for a very long time; he remains a predominantly lonely, happy poet, for which we, his readers, are increasingly grateful." – Leslie Monsour

"We can only hope that Wilbur is granted another decade, and another book as fine as Mayflies. – Alan Sullivan."

Reviews of Mayflies

Times Literary Supplement

“... Mayflies would be worth reading simply for Wilbur's fluent translation of Canto XXV of Dante's Inferno, [but] the book contains, too, a few poems that rank among his best – the austere intensity of 'Crow's Nests', the rhyming tercets of 'Zea', the beautiful consolation of 'For C.' This last poem, a praise and joyful witness of longstanding love, ends with words that could stand as a fit description of Wilbur's ouevre: 'A Passion joined to courtesy and art / Which has the quality of something made, / Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent, / Like a rose window or the firmament." – Ian Tromp

Poetry London

“Wilbur has been writing ... superb, brilliant, kindly, highly intelligent, deeply literary verse for nearly 60 years ... [H]is new collection, Mayflies, is again wonderfully interesting and well-written. The poems are quieter and less showy than in his prime, but the best of them (e.g. ‘For C’, ‘This Pleasing Anxious Being’) still advance urbanely on the reader and then leave one shocked by the sudden emotional power which can be carried by such a civilised vehicle.” – D.M. Black

San Francisco Chronicle

“[Wilbur’s] New and Collected Poems won a Pulitzer Prize (his second) in 1988, leaving some to assume ... that it would be the capstone of a long career. Now we have this luminous coda as well ... Mayflies is a book to keep, re-read, ponder and memorize.” – Cynthia Haven

The Hudson Review

“Let me end this review by ehorting the reader to acquire a copy of Richard Wilbur's latest volume, Mayflies. As a critic, I have a hard time framing a response to the book because my reaction is wholly uncritical: I find almost every poem in the book beautiful and wise ... [T]his book is a necessary addition to every poetry lover's library." – Emily Grosholz

Kirkus Reviews

“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.”

The Antioch Review

"Expectedly, the translations (of Mallarmé, Cassian, Petrov, Baudelaire, Molière, and Dante) included in Mayflies are brilliantly crafted. Superb English poems in their own right, those done from the French exhibit a sprightly inventiveness, while conveying nearly all the original meanings." – John Taylor

New York Review of Books

“Readers familiar with the long sweep of Wilbur’s career will hear in Mayflies many echoes, thematic and formal, of what has gone before. But they will also find that the new variations extend and enrich the old Wilbur music ... It’s been a long while since I came across a new book of contemporary American poetry which, in its consistency, clarity, and fullness of tone, felt so heartening.” – Brad Leithauser