Mayflies: New Poems and Translations

by Richard Wilbur

Book Overview

In 1989 Richard Wilbur published New and Collected Poems, a landmark volume that won that year's Pulitzer Prize. Now, ten years later, he has prepared a collection of all the poetry he has written in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151004692
• ISBN13: 9780151004690
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Wilbur's Singular Genius

Poems in the New Yorker are usually ignored, but "Mayflies" stood out from the page. "--with sudden glittering, as when a group of stars appear in a brief gap of black and driven cloud -----" or "I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies in their quadrillions rise" or "---the pistons in some bright machine---". I think this is the best poem in the English language, better even than A.E. Houseman's "The Cherry Tree". Both short poems take us from a beautiful image into the life of the writer. To see Wilbur's great talent of expressing so much with just a few words, his translation of Baudelaire's "Albatross" should be compared with the original. Amazingly beautiful economy, enough to make the French poet jealous.

a gift not lessened over many decades

Richard Wilbur, our best living poet of the formal (and yes, often rhyming!) mode, is still writing wonderfully complex, insightful poems. He can be compared to March King John Philip Sousa, who also embraced a formal genre which other composers may have found stultifying. It is evidence of the time-defying talents of both men that their later work is as fresh and engaging as the efforts of their youth, and as unlimited by the highly structured forms they both chose. People hearing a Sousa march today are as taken with its infectious high spirits as those who heard it a hundred years ago. I believe that Wilbur's poems will prove as moving and as enduring. The best poem is the title work, "Mayflies." As a Lay Carmelite I especially savor the lines, "...called to be/ Not fly or star/ But one whose task is joyfully to see/ How fair the fiats of the caller are." Read this life-enhancing poem, and draw nearer to the Caller who created stars and mayflies, and poets too!

from Maine

The title poem in this volume is worth the price of the entire book. No, a hundred, a thousand times that. One should memorize that poem for those times when one's soul is as dry as a chip of cured wood.

Master craftsman

It is a pleasure to read the work of Richard Wilbur and to know that, nearly eighty, he is still capable of writing graceful, elegant poems that both move and enlighten. Aside from a number of short formal poems, this collection offers recent, delightful translations of Dante and Moliere.One feels better knowing that poets like Wilbur are still toiling in the formal vineyards, producing such lovely and accessible works as these.

Wilbur's new book perhaps his best

His latest book of poms is showing Richard Wilbur in top form as ever. America's greatest living poet, and one of her greatest ever, Wilbur is back with all his themes of metaphysics and love, able to use all forms and tones with ease. Light poems, serious poems, there's something here for everyone.