One of the most popular of the Roman poets, Catullus is known for the accessibility of his witty and erotic love poems. In this book Charles Martin, himself a poet, offers a deeper reading of Catullus, revealing the art and intelligence behind the seemingly spontaneous verse. Martin considers Catullus' life, habits of composition, and the circumstances in which he worked. He places him among the modernists of his age, who created a new ironic and subjective poetics, and he shows the affinity between Catullus and the modernists of our own age. Martin offers intepretations of Catullus' poems, viewing the love poems to "Lesbia" as unified, artfully arranged poetic sequence, and the short poems, often dismissed as unworthy of serious critical attention, as the irreverent products of a sophisticated poetic innovator. Unlike Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, Catullus did not influence our literary culture until the beginning of the modern era, but he is now regarded as a poet who speaks to our age with a singular directness. Pointing to Catullus' self-awareness, playfulness, and comic invention and to the elaborate complexity of his experiments in poetic form, Martin aims to give both the scholar and the general reader a fresh appreciation of his poetic art.

Catullus (Hermes Books)

Literature & Fiction

Martin, Professor Charles

Humor & Satire

Yale University Press

Like bright graffiti in a schoolyard, Charles Martin's poems "renew the ancient complaint/ of speech against stone." Serious and playful-- often at the same time-- they give form to the part of us that resists blank walls. "Steal the Bacon" shows Martin at his inventive best, drawing figures in language. That language ranges from prehistoric scrimshaw to the word on the sign at the end of the world. At Crusoe's command, Friday narrates a long poem in eighteenth-century diction, giving "a true Account of our Life together/ in all Particulars"; another man teaches English to recent immigrants in a new land that they will discover "exists only in what we say about it." Poems eavesdrop on various nesting places in which domesticity translates the language of desire, or explore the silences of a landscape without history, perhaps without a future. But throughout "Steal the Bacon, " voices affirm the present, even if they can affirm nothing else. The word on the sign at the end of the world is "Yes."

Steal the Bacon (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

Poetry

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Like bright graffiti in a schoolyard, Charles Martin's poems "renew the ancient complaint/ of speech against stone". Serious and playful-- often at the same time-- they give form to the part of us that resists blank walls. "Steal the Bacon" shows Martin at his inventive best, drawing figures in language. That language ranges from prehistoric scrimshaw to the word on the sign at the end of the world. At Crusoe's command, Friday narrates a long poem in eighteenth-century diction, giving "a true Account of our Life together/ in all Particulars"; another man teaches English to recent immigrants in a new land that they will discover "exists only in what we say about it". Poems eavesdrop on various nesting places in which domesticity translates the language of desire, or explore the silences of a landscape without history, perhaps without a future. But throughout "Steal the Bacon", voices affirm the present, even if they can affirm nothing else. The word on the sign at the end of the world is "Yes".

"Martin is a moralist in the best sense of the word, a poet concerned with defining human values in a changing society, making his points with wit as well as compassion. He is not afraid of using ideas in verse and brings his intelligence as well as imagination to bear on each poem."--Dana Gioia 
In this new collection by poet and translator Charles Martin, a darkly comic vision engages an unpredictable variety of subjects in poems of astute technical assurance. In this book, the reader will find a displaced snapping turtle, advertisements that look back at us, the link between classical Athens and a television quiz show, and many other wonders, including the unsettling possibility of a poetry reading 
"Whose audience consists of... you. There's only one of you, I see. One would have hoped there might be two. One ought to be outnumbered by One's audience, don't you agree? The two of us, then? You and I? Will no one else be dropping in? I thought as much. Then let's begin... "
Praise for Passages from Friday: "Martin's Friday... is a wholly successful characterization. His plain speech and plebeian misspellings, his notional capitals and italics compromise... a style that realizes and projects the speaker's character, a tour de force in which style embodies vision."--Daniel Hoffman, in Words to Create a World
 Praise forThe Poems of Catullus: "[A] translation that successfully recreates in English the wit, the lyric exaltation, the playful banter, the despair, the scurrilous invective, and the dramatic flair of the original, all of it moving easily in artfully contrived and skillfully controlled English equivalents of Catullus' many and varied meters."--Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
"Martin is an American poet; he puts the poetry, the immediacy of the street, back into English Catullus. The effect is electric."--Newsweek

What The Darkness Proposes: Poems (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

United States

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Martin, Professor Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Martin, Professor Charles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Martin, Professor Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Catullus (Hermes Books)

Steal the Bacon (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

Steal the Bacon (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

What The Darkness Proposes: Poems (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)