Anterooms

New Poems and Translations

Richard Wilbur

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780547358116
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547504629
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poetry lovers and critics will rejoice at the news of this collection from Richard Wilbur, the legendary poet and translator who was called “a hero to a new generation of critics” by the New York Times Book Review, and whose work continues to be masterful, accomplished, whimsical, fresh, and important.

A yellow-striped, green measuring worm opens Anterooms, a collection filled with poems that are classic Wilbur, that play with myth and form and examine the human condition through reflections on nature and love. Anterooms also features masterly translations from Mallarmé’s “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe,” a previously unpublished Verlaine poem, two poems by Joseph Brodsky, and thirty-seven of Symphosius’s clever Latin riddles.

Whether he is considering a snow shovel and domestic life or playfully considering that “Inside homeowner is the word meow,” Wilbur’s new collection is sure to delight everyone from longtime devotees to casual poetry readers. Exploring the interplay between the everyday and the mythic, the sobering and the lighthearted, Anterooms is nothing less than an event in poetic history and a remarkable addition to a master’s oeuvre.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Author's Note
• The House
• I
• A Measuring Worm
• Flying
• Psalm
• Young Orchard
• Anterooms
• Trismegistus
• Terza Rima
• Galveston, 1961
• A Pasture Poem
• Ecclesiastes 11:1
• Soon
• II
• STÉPHANE MALLARME: The Tomb of Edgar Poe
• PAUL VERLAINE: An Unpublished Poem
• Horace II, 10
• JOSEPH BRODSKY: Two Nativity Poems
• III
• Out Here
• The Censor
• A Reckoning
• A Prelude
• The President's Song to the Baron
• Some Words Inside of Words
• IV
• Thirty-seven Riddles from Symphosius
• Answers to the RIddles