The Darkness and the Light

The Darkness and the Light

“Some years – no decades! – ago, Anthony Hecht was pleased to call the poems in The Hard Hours, his second book, ‘a few snapshots from along the Via Negativa.’ Loyal to that figuration the poet remains, though how much more intense the chiaroscuro here, how much deeper the imprint: these are the poems of Horatio after so much of Denmark’s personnel has been cleared away, meditating loss and survival, rich with a survivor’s torn wisdom. For all the glee of the poesis, Hecht’s lines are severe even in their civility, their music wild even in its mastery. Rendered in his eighth book is the judgment of an unrelenting and an unreconciled art.”  – Richard Howard

Reviews of The Darkness and the Light

New York Review of Books
“Hecht, for all his pessimism, is fascinated by the sheer sumptuous richness of things … He loves language as much as he loves the visible world, and handles rhyme and meter with the same scrupulous, almost sensuous attention to detail as he paints still life … [He has] the sharp eye for pretension of a latter-day Byron … A wry and wholly contemporary American voice.” – Al Alvarez

Sewanee Review
“Hecht’s superb new collection is stuffed with rich and complex poems that beggar easy description and that demand our closest scrutiny. One reading won’t be enough to yield the fullness of meaning and the artfulness of language and form embodied in these poems.” – George Core

San Francisco Chronicle
“The music of his work, and the gorgeous precision of his language, are as strong as ever.” – Carmela Ciuraru

Washington Post
“One of our greatest living poets.” – Michael Dirda

St Louis Post-Dispatch
“The … poems in this latest volume reflect the distinct versatility and disciplined precision that have marked his craft, in both free and strictly formal verse, from the beginning … If certain poets are still regarded as prophets, gifted with extraordinary spiritual and moral insight, Anthony Hecht is surely a prince among prophets.” – Charles Guenther

The New Republic
“His gifts are of a kind rare today –  seriousness, intelligence, formal discipline – and he has expressed as skilfully as any writer of the last fifty years the anxiety of the civilized mind facing the large and small barbarisms of the age.” – Adam Kirsch

Booklist
“…Hecht knows his classics and uses them, to the extent of including translations of ancient, medieval, and modern master poets in this book. He appreciates the perdurable forcefulness and relevance of classic situations and conceits. He sees in the predicament of weekend fathers patrolling “the Olmsted bosks of Central Park, / Its children-thronged resorts, / Pain-tainted ground” that of lost souls in a circle of a Dantesque hell. Many poems borrow from the Bible, allusively in ‘The Hanging Gardens of Tyburn’ (Tyburn was eighteenth-century London’s gallows), and directly in ‘Saul and David,’ ‘Judith,’ ‘The Road to Damascus,’ and others. ‘Sacrifice’ juxtaposes God’s trial of Abraham and Isaac with a modern incident in which a fleeing German soldier threatens but spares a French farm family’s 14-year-old son; the poem challenges each reader to ponder the historical as well as theological nature of mercy. These provocative, impeccably crafted poems are to be read repeatedly and not exhausted. They are, in short, classical.” – Ray Olson

Kirkus Reviews
“A fiercely melancholic sequence of lyrics, odes, monologues, and translations, many of them written with the Biblical tales in mind. The severe rhythms and wild rhymes (‘guano’ is made to chime with ‘soprano’) make wonderfully baroque patterns – Bach partitas set stylishly to words. But music is only part of the festivities offered in Hecht’s work. His poems are also painterly, full of still lives, landscapes, and jewel-box miniatures. Lot’s wife remembers the ‘exquisite satisfactions’ of her childhood in this way: ‘The iridescent labyrinth of the spider, / Its tethered tensor nest of polygons / puffed by the breeze to a little bellying sail – / Merely observing this gave infinite pleasure.’ Hecht often figures the poet as a witness, and the infinite pleasures of observation are always mixed with more difficult moral concerns like passivity, historical atrocity, and individual despair. In ‘A Witness,’ a ‘briny, tough, and thorned sea holly’ watches as ‘The ocean rams itself in pitched assault / And spastic rage to which there is no halt . . . / At scenes of sacrifice, unrelieved pain, / figured in froth, aquamarine and black.’ That pain should go unrelieved is Hecht’s way of acknowledging poetry’s limits and history’s wounds; the tough holly is his protest against both. Another tactic for combating forgetfulness is to resurrect a voice. Hecht’s most well known poem of this type is ‘The Maid of Dover’ (after Arnold), and in the new collection he approaches those heights with the savage ‘Judith’: ‘It was easy. Holofernes was pretty tight; / I had only to show some cleavage and he was done for.’ No contemporary poet is so lapidary as Hecht. That he can put such beauty at the service of a stringent ethic is his continual gift.” – Unsigned