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University Of Chicago Press
September 2012
On Sale: September 14, 2012
ISBN: 0226244881
EAN: 9780226244884
Paperback
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Fiction Poetry
Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferryβs 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 Ferryβs 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 againstβand withβhis 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 Ferryβs 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 itβs like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferryβs 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.
 Media BuzzPBS News Hour - March 4, 2013
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