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

"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