Stars Principal

Literature & Fiction

McClatchy, J.D.

Poetry

Macmillan Pub. Co.

Stars Principal: Poems

MacMillan Publishing Company

White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry

History & Criticism

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Collection of articles (many of them previously published in various literary reviews), each focusing on a particular poet: Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, James Merrill, Richard Howard, John Hollander, Amy Clampitt, and Anthony Hecht.

In Twenty Questions, one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical―and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars Poetica unavailable elsewhere―J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind. McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet and as a man, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility―from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenious reader to accomplished poet-critic. Later sections range through poetry past and present―from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin―with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount" is interwoven with compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the tradition of light verse. The questions McClatchy poses of poems prompt a fresh look and the last word. Free of scholarly pretension, elegantly and movingly written, Twenty Questions is a bright, open window onto a public and private experience of poetry, to be appreciated by poets, readers, and critics alike.

Twenty Questions

Columbia University Press

In Twenty Questions, one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical―and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars Poetica unavailable elsewhere―J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind. McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet and as a man, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility―from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenious reader to accomplished poet-critic. Later sections range through poetry past and present―from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin―with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount" is interwoven with compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the tradition of light verse. The questions McClatchy poses of poems prompt a fresh look and the last word. Free of scholarly pretension, elegantly and movingly written, Twenty Questions is a bright, open window onto a public and private experience of poetry, to be appreciated by poets, readers, and critics alike.

Since the publication of Hazmat, a book about the life of the body—short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize—J. D. McClatchy’s poetry has increasingly taken up the life of the soul. Now in verse as quicksilver as it is authoritative, he returns to themes he has touched on before, but from a new or unusual perspective—focusing on the frame rather than the picture, the tear rather than the sorrow. The title poem captures the nervous energy and aloneness surrounding the figure of Mercury, while the stunning long poem “Sorrow in 1944” tells the tale of the grown child of Madame Butterfly. McClatchy’s impulse is to tell the story after the story, the minor opera in the shadows of a great one that nonetheless tells its own tale of the heart, bearing its own measure of tragedy and hope. With its emotional range, maturity, and formal elegance, Mercury Dressing is the finest work to date from one of our most significant poets. Mercury Dressing To steal a glance and, anxious, see Him slipping into transparency— The feathered helmet already in place, Its shadow fallen across his face (His hooded sex its counterpart)— Unsteadies the routines of the heart. If I reach out and touch his wing, What harm, what help might he then bring? But suddenly he disappears, As so much else has down the years . . . Until I feel him deep inside The emptiness, preoccupied. His nerve electrifies the air. His message is his being there.

Mercury Dressing: Poems

KNOPF

Ten Commandments is a book-length sequence of poems that plot the rules we were raised on, rules we forget but can't evade. Here is the whole underworld of desire, its tasks and perversions. Here are the iron laws and the way the heart is shaped by them, even as it prefers betrayal, adultery, murder, or greed. J. D. McClatchy draws on intimate authobiographical details, and on a range of historical incidents that includes an eerie account of Proust in a brothel and a chilling glimpse of Eichmann in Argentina. Sideshow freaks, snipers in Vietnam, Auden's dictionary, whirling dervishes, motel and mammogram, slave and saint--this book is a cabinet of moral curiosities, a collage of emotional astonishments. When McClatchy's previous book, The Rest of the Way, was published in 1990, he was given an Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, whose citation concluded, "it may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation." With Ten Commandments, there can be no question of his mastery. Here is that rare eloquence indeed, charged with passion and raised to a remarkable new power.

Ten Commandments

Hazmat

HAZMAT, meaning “hazardous material,” is an abbreviation familiar from signs at the entrances to long dark tunnels or on the sides of suspicious containers. Here, in a series of stunning poems, J. D. McClatchy examines the first hazmat we all encounter: our own bodies. The virtuosic “Tattoos” meditates on why we decorate the body’s surface, while other poems plunge daringly inward, capturing the way in which everything that makes us human–desire and decay, need and curiosity, the jarring sense of loss and mortality–hovers in the flesh. In the midst of it all is the heart, its treacheries, its gnawing grievances, its boundless capacities. With their stark titles (“Cancer,” “Feces,” “Jihad”), McClatchy’s poems work dazzling variations on this book’s theme: how we live with the fact that we will die. Crowned by the twenty-part sequence “Motets,” which deals out an exquisite hand of emotional crises, this collection brings us a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling. Holding up a powerful poetic mirror, McClatchy shows us our very selves in a chilling series of images: the melodrama of the body being played out, as it must be, in the theater of the spirit.

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

Books by McClatchy, J.D.

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

Stars Principal

Stars Principal: Poems

White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry

White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry

Twenty Questions

Twenty Questions

Mercury Dressing: Poems

Ten Commandments

Hazmat

Ten Commandments