This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt

This volume brings together a lifetime's achievement by one of America's outstanding poets of the twentieth century. Though his earliest poems were published more than sixty years ago, Ben Belitt's works in sum are likely to strike readers today with the force of unprecedented encounter. A poet of abundance and sometimes carnivalesque riotousness, Belitt also calls to mind the intensity and eruptiveness of Hopkins, the double passion for the infinite and the empirical exemplified by Neruda, and the lustrous word-painting associated with Keatsian Romanticism. But as these diverse predecessors suggest, Belitt is altogether an original, whose derivation is as multiple as his figuration. His concerns range from the appalled enthrallment with violence and disorder to the rage to learn how one can live in chance and confront the mandates of mortality.