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University Of Chicago Press
September 2012
On Sale: September 14, 2012
ISBN: 0226244881
EAN: 9780226244884
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Fiction Poetry
Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that
poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of
means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s
prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take
your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates
beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and
colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the
most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half
century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for
vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his
phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical
variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly
flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry.
Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience
and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s
use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his
writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of
feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like
witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst
of an eruption.
Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated
English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as
bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations
in this book are vitally related to the original poems
around them.
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