Late Autumn at Dumbarton Oaks: and Other Poems

Beginning with its title poem, a political elegy rooted in both Western and Eastern lyrical traditions and set in the elegant gardens of Dumbarton Oaks, this second volume of verse by Johann Moser offers for your pleasure a sumptuous banquet of poetic legacies and achievements. It includes not only the sequence "Études: For Shakespearian Voices," composed to pay homage to the prosodic and figurative virtuosity of Shakespeare, but also other sequences exploring the demands and delights of the rural life, the glory of maritime seascapes, and a host of traditional verse kinds, some of them embracing such macabre expostulations as the Moritat and the Gallows Song. Here, too, is a memorial to the Irish Brigade at Gettysburg, integrating into its Civil War imagery allusions to an ancient Irish battle hymn from the eighth century. This volume concludes with an extensive series of sprightly marionette dance-songs, composed in iambic tetrameter couplets, and a set of literary "palimpsests" written to perpetuate some features of great literary classics, such as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and the Munchausen "tall-tale" tradition.