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Left-handed: Poems
An emotionally riveting collection that tells a powerful story of passion, loss, and transformation.
Left-handed unfolds in the manner of an intense, searching novella. At its center is a one-way dialogue with an elusive character who beguiles and torments but also inspires the unnamed narrator, who at midlife is telling the tale.
These poems—decisive, wrenching, exquisite—show an overpowering force, at once disruptive and creative, invading a settled existence. They take us from the streets of New York City to a house in the country, from the island of Naxos to the Roman Forum. They reach back to the sonnets of Shakespeare but find inspiration, too, in contemporary life. Naked and raw, lyrical yet formally inventive, rich with the melancholy wisdom of age, this is a work of resonant and shimmering beauty.
Left-handed unfolds in the manner of an intense, searching novella. At its center is a one-way dialogue with an elusive character who beguiles and torments but also inspires the unnamed narrator, who at midlife is telling the tale.
These poems—decisive, wrenching, exquisite—show an overpowering force, at once disruptive and creative, invading a settled existence. They take us from the streets of New York City to a house in the country, from the island of Naxos to the Roman Forum. They reach back to the sonnets of Shakespeare but find inspiration, too, in contemporary life. Naked and raw, lyrical yet formally inventive, rich with the melancholy wisdom of age, this is a work of resonant and shimmering beauty.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Jonathan Galassi
33 books28 followersJonathan Galassi born 1949 in Seattle, Washington, is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the eight major publishers in New York. He began his publishing career at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, moved to Random House in New York, and finally, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He joined FSG as executive editor in 1985, after being fired from Random House. Two years later, he was named editor-in-chief, and is now President and Publisher.
Galassi is also a translator of poetry and a poet himself. He has translated and published the poetic works of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. His honors as a poet include a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his activities include having been poetry editor for The Paris Review for ten years, and being an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The Nation and the Poetry Foundation website.
Galassi graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy where he became interested in poetry, writing and literature, and from Harvard College in 1971. He was a Marshall Scholar at Christ's College, Cambridge. He realized while attending Christ’s College that he wanted a career in book publishing. Galassi was born in Seattle (his father worked as an attorney for the Justice Department), but he grew up in Plympton, Massachusetts. He lives in Brooklyn.
Galassi is also a translator of poetry and a poet himself. He has translated and published the poetic works of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. His honors as a poet include a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his activities include having been poetry editor for The Paris Review for ten years, and being an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The Nation and the Poetry Foundation website.
Galassi graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy where he became interested in poetry, writing and literature, and from Harvard College in 1971. He was a Marshall Scholar at Christ's College, Cambridge. He realized while attending Christ’s College that he wanted a career in book publishing. Galassi was born in Seattle (his father worked as an attorney for the Justice Department), but he grew up in Plympton, Massachusetts. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 20, 2012
There's a lot going on with this book. The author wrote for and about a time when he left his wife and kids for another man, literary agent Bill Clegg. It's not like you can fully understand that from the text though. It seems the author hides a lot behind poetic license and double talk to mar the situation and hide his feelings.
Certain elements ring true, the infatuation phase of love is clearly conveyed. His wonder of Clegg is apparent but you can see the path he's on from the beginning. He over thinks the relationship, he's home writing poetry about Clegg while Clegg is I'm guessing living his life. I can relate, it's hard not to let new love enter infatuation. But the author really loses himself, his sense of self worth, he has validity, he brings things to the table too, but he loses sight of these things.
I like that he keeps some rhyming in the poetry and that it often has a strong structure. What is less good is the over analysis to the point of getting lost in the details. The details choke out the emotion. It's like the author couldn't fully let himself express his school-girl infatuation feelings, that he felt he had to be more high-brow than that.
A celebration of the transience of beauty is related as:
FEAST YOURSELF ON BEAUTY
WHILE YOU CAN, THE USELESS
THING: THE NECK, THE HIP,
THE ROAD BETWEEN THE HILLS,
THE SHORT HAIRS ON THE CHIN,
THE SNOW ON THE TABLE.
The snow on the table? I don't understand how the Times says "direct and plain-spoken" of this work. To me he is bringing in metaphors that cannot be understood by anyone who isn't him which really serves to alienate the reader from the emotion of the work. I believe he is intellectualizing with the purpose of keeping us out.
As the relationship deteriorates there really is less and less the ability for an outsider to distinguish what is actually happening or to find the emotion in Galassi's riddles. It ends up making love feel sterile.
Certain elements ring true, the infatuation phase of love is clearly conveyed. His wonder of Clegg is apparent but you can see the path he's on from the beginning. He over thinks the relationship, he's home writing poetry about Clegg while Clegg is I'm guessing living his life. I can relate, it's hard not to let new love enter infatuation. But the author really loses himself, his sense of self worth, he has validity, he brings things to the table too, but he loses sight of these things.
I like that he keeps some rhyming in the poetry and that it often has a strong structure. What is less good is the over analysis to the point of getting lost in the details. The details choke out the emotion. It's like the author couldn't fully let himself express his school-girl infatuation feelings, that he felt he had to be more high-brow than that.
A celebration of the transience of beauty is related as:
FEAST YOURSELF ON BEAUTY
WHILE YOU CAN, THE USELESS
THING: THE NECK, THE HIP,
THE ROAD BETWEEN THE HILLS,
THE SHORT HAIRS ON THE CHIN,
THE SNOW ON THE TABLE.
The snow on the table? I don't understand how the Times says "direct and plain-spoken" of this work. To me he is bringing in metaphors that cannot be understood by anyone who isn't him which really serves to alienate the reader from the emotion of the work. I believe he is intellectualizing with the purpose of keeping us out.
As the relationship deteriorates there really is less and less the ability for an outsider to distinguish what is actually happening or to find the emotion in Galassi's riddles. It ends up making love feel sterile.
April 16, 2014
These poems were difficult to read. I was much more interested in the background story that I read about that apparently prompted this book of poetry - love unrequited then requited, or was it the other way around?
Many of the poem occupy an inch or two horizontally, which is a difficult amount of space to say anything in. The only thing I liked and connected with was the Envoi at the front of the volume.
I don't mean to be harsh. This might be poetry for someone else, it just wasn't for me.
Many of the poem occupy an inch or two horizontally, which is a difficult amount of space to say anything in. The only thing I liked and connected with was the Envoi at the front of the volume.
I don't mean to be harsh. This might be poetry for someone else, it just wasn't for me.
October 16, 2016
His poems hit my heart so hard when I was skimming through at the bookstore that I had to buy it and then finished it in one evening. Love.
October 28, 2014
Some amazing lines, and one or two poems really blew me away, but Galassi's refusal to part from the super-short line bogs him down more than it lifts him up. Also, he lets formal structures -- rhyme requirements, for instance -- influence his diction too noticeably, which makes for an awkward word choice here and there. Ultimately a decent book -- those or two poems are worth the read alone.
February 22, 2021
This is the only book I've ever read more than once (at the time of writing this review). Lovesick and conflicted poems for the aching gay soul. You can tell there was a lot of heart put into these. I have a hard time getting into his other work, but if you're a hopeless homosexual romantic like me with a bit of a guilt complex, these will speak to you. I will say that the Blackberry poems section in the middle is very frantic and can be a little difficult to read compared to the rest of the works in this book, but if you can lose yourself in disjointed and chaotic imagery, you'll get more out of them. This book isn't for everyone, but it's a short read anyway, so I highly recommend it if I've piqued your interest at all.
April 24, 2022
I often prefer to read poetry without tying it too closely to the poet's own life, but in this case, I think it would have been helpful if I had known a bit about Galassi's own biography as I was going through the poems. Only late in the volume did I look it up and realize that many of his life's events - his divorce from his wife, his coming out as gay, and his unrequited pining after another man - formed the narrative arc that tie these poems together. I need to go back and reread with this knowledge in mind, as I think I would appreciate it even more. Even without doing so, I can say this was a well-crafted volume. There are a few individual poems I felt didn't really add much, but as a whole, it was a moving and eloquent book.
February 26, 2021
Loved it! A poetry book that spoke to me. About loves, won and lost, about how we change and remain the same, about memories real or imagined.
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May 2, 2014“Men at forty,” as Donald Justice wrote, learn to turn their backs, or close doors—“softly”— on youth and long-passed opportunities as part of their accommodation to a life of mortgages, the body’s increasing betrayals, and other failures of middle age. Perhaps the most painful of these stem from love and marriage, as well as the domestic life that sometimes confines men as inescapably as it does women, though the emotional content of poems that are mirror-images of Justice’s abound too—just pick up any journal and let your eyes fall on lines exulting in “parenthood at fifty.” (Or sixty.)
Not that my gender is innocent of producing lame, unmusical domestic anecdotes. I suspect that we see fewer such efforts in print because male and female editors laugh them off the table, whereas their response to The Male Mid-Life Crisis Poem, and the resultant period style, tends to be more respectful. Sir Stephen Spender has remarked that such periods have shrunk from twenty to five years—ten at most. I won’t bore you with the litany of “movements” that have occurred since the middle of the last century, but will only warn that the speed at which we are living often precludes reading anything but the newest, and our sense of history is disappearing.
While Jonathan Galassi, as editor-in-chief of FSG Books, is obviously conversant with the work being done in our own time, he offers a solution to tunnel vision fixed on the present tense: looking beyond it for predecessors to infuse, confuse, or reject. In the case of Galassi’s *Left-Handed*, we read of a wrestling match akin to Jacob’s with the angel, and a double-header at that: the longtime presence of Eugenio Montale in the life of a man renowned for translating him, among other things, but not for publicly wrangling with his own heart’s desires and their mutability. In “Leaving a Dove,” subtitled “Ely Cathedral,” for example, Galassi tells us that the bird
…has landed me
among headstones, under spires where the sky nests.
Dawns and lights in air: I’ve loved the sun,
color of honey, now I crave the dark
I want smoldering fire, this tomb
that doesn’t soar, your stare that dares it to.
(Collected Poems, 1999)
Note the riven longing and lyricism, and also the use of rhyme, both perfect and slant. “Spire,” “sky,” and “air” urge us upward, as if toward the title’s dove—which, perversely, has “landed” the poet—or magnificent Norman Cathedral’s towers themselves, but “fire,” “stare,” and “dare” plunge the reader toward that tomb, earthbound and yet potentially transcendent if . . . if what? Here lie, so to speak, already the central urge and urgency of Left-Handed: a love that “dared” not speak its name for many years, and then with results many of us could not withstand; yet Galassi also “dares” repudiate the man who done him wrong: “You never knew me and you never will,” he writes in the opening section “A Clean Slate.”
Descent to the demotic—among my favorite half-rhymes in *Left-Handed* appears in “The Scarf,” where the dream once held dear becomes a “contraption / for unhappiness”—doesn’t negate the highly serious nature of Galassi’s choice: “Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything,” writes Frank Bidart—one of those Galassi has published during his long and estimable career as editor, translator, and poet--in “Queer.” Galassi’s decision to cease deception about “everything,” and to publish the poems that read like a fever chart of throbbing between erotic enthrallment—which is hardly portrayed as liberating except as an act of truth—and family life results in a book of closure and disclosure, but nothing “sinister”—the archaic term from heraldry that refers to the “left-handed” side of the coat of arms, at least from the bearer’s point of view—in the sense of inhuman cruelty or evil appears here. And what must be born[e], and result from that difficult carriage, is ultimately Galassi’s cry toward the heavens that Montale’s cathedral arches toward, like the ivy climbing his trees in an earlier poem, "May" (http://thepoetryfoundation.createsend...), from *North Street and Other Poems."
Not that my gender is innocent of producing lame, unmusical domestic anecdotes. I suspect that we see fewer such efforts in print because male and female editors laugh them off the table, whereas their response to The Male Mid-Life Crisis Poem, and the resultant period style, tends to be more respectful. Sir Stephen Spender has remarked that such periods have shrunk from twenty to five years—ten at most. I won’t bore you with the litany of “movements” that have occurred since the middle of the last century, but will only warn that the speed at which we are living often precludes reading anything but the newest, and our sense of history is disappearing.
While Jonathan Galassi, as editor-in-chief of FSG Books, is obviously conversant with the work being done in our own time, he offers a solution to tunnel vision fixed on the present tense: looking beyond it for predecessors to infuse, confuse, or reject. In the case of Galassi’s *Left-Handed*, we read of a wrestling match akin to Jacob’s with the angel, and a double-header at that: the longtime presence of Eugenio Montale in the life of a man renowned for translating him, among other things, but not for publicly wrangling with his own heart’s desires and their mutability. In “Leaving a Dove,” subtitled “Ely Cathedral,” for example, Galassi tells us that the bird
…has landed me
among headstones, under spires where the sky nests.
Dawns and lights in air: I’ve loved the sun,
color of honey, now I crave the dark
I want smoldering fire, this tomb
that doesn’t soar, your stare that dares it to.
(Collected Poems, 1999)
Note the riven longing and lyricism, and also the use of rhyme, both perfect and slant. “Spire,” “sky,” and “air” urge us upward, as if toward the title’s dove—which, perversely, has “landed” the poet—or magnificent Norman Cathedral’s towers themselves, but “fire,” “stare,” and “dare” plunge the reader toward that tomb, earthbound and yet potentially transcendent if . . . if what? Here lie, so to speak, already the central urge and urgency of Left-Handed: a love that “dared” not speak its name for many years, and then with results many of us could not withstand; yet Galassi also “dares” repudiate the man who done him wrong: “You never knew me and you never will,” he writes in the opening section “A Clean Slate.”
Descent to the demotic—among my favorite half-rhymes in *Left-Handed* appears in “The Scarf,” where the dream once held dear becomes a “contraption / for unhappiness”—doesn’t negate the highly serious nature of Galassi’s choice: “Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything,” writes Frank Bidart—one of those Galassi has published during his long and estimable career as editor, translator, and poet--in “Queer.” Galassi’s decision to cease deception about “everything,” and to publish the poems that read like a fever chart of throbbing between erotic enthrallment—which is hardly portrayed as liberating except as an act of truth—and family life results in a book of closure and disclosure, but nothing “sinister”—the archaic term from heraldry that refers to the “left-handed” side of the coat of arms, at least from the bearer’s point of view—in the sense of inhuman cruelty or evil appears here. And what must be born[e], and result from that difficult carriage, is ultimately Galassi’s cry toward the heavens that Montale’s cathedral arches toward, like the ivy climbing his trees in an earlier poem, "May" (http://thepoetryfoundation.createsend...), from *North Street and Other Poems."
September 3, 2012
A dash of Verlaine steals through these tender, hopeful and indestructible verses. Jonathan Galassi shows a full hand, touching on all the high notes of romance, longing, seduction and keen observation.
The most hard-hitting poems reside in a rarified atmosphere of economy and splendor. “The Scarf” mopes about a lover’s disaffection. “When or if you wear / your Loro Piana scarf / the one I gave you…,” is intimate, capturing silken angst with concision.
Galassi underpins his poems with radiant threads, including exotic locales like Umbria, Cambridge, the lake and the terrace. The gem-like sonnet “Shine” revels in Williams’ notion of “no ideas but in things.” Rich details are spun out, from “melon water sliding off a chin to “a patent-leather glow.”
Sleek and reserved, formal and revealing, the poems arc from failure at love (in “Youth” to tentative exultation at the end (“Young Maple in Ghent”). With an unerring ear for metaphor, Galassi has the maple stand in for life and “the few long perfect days we get.”
Bracketing the entire collection are two talismanic poems in italics: “Envoi” and “Ruins.” Reflecting on Mayan stones in the latter, Galassi chisels an enduring epitaph. These poems will last.
The most hard-hitting poems reside in a rarified atmosphere of economy and splendor. “The Scarf” mopes about a lover’s disaffection. “When or if you wear / your Loro Piana scarf / the one I gave you…,” is intimate, capturing silken angst with concision.
Galassi underpins his poems with radiant threads, including exotic locales like Umbria, Cambridge, the lake and the terrace. The gem-like sonnet “Shine” revels in Williams’ notion of “no ideas but in things.” Rich details are spun out, from “melon water sliding off a chin to “a patent-leather glow.”
Sleek and reserved, formal and revealing, the poems arc from failure at love (in “Youth” to tentative exultation at the end (“Young Maple in Ghent”). With an unerring ear for metaphor, Galassi has the maple stand in for life and “the few long perfect days we get.”
Bracketing the entire collection are two talismanic poems in italics: “Envoi” and “Ruins.” Reflecting on Mayan stones in the latter, Galassi chisels an enduring epitaph. These poems will last.
May 7, 2012
Memoir written in verse by a man who happens to be the Publisher of one of the major houses (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). It is about his obsession with literary agent Bill Clegg, whose memoir I read recently thus I felt compelled to read this. The poems are lovely and the (then-married) man’s anguish is clear. Alas, I could not help but find it all a little pathetic. Maybe it was the age difference? The knowledge Clegg probably didn’t give two shits about him? Clegg is a real a-hole. The writing is beautiful, I just wasn’t as moved as I expected to be.
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February 5, 2016I really enjoyed this collection of poetry. If poetry allows one to see things and feel emotions that are there and brings them to the forefront, these poems are very effective. I liked the construct of the poems and the address to you. However, unless one is aware of the backstory, one could put any meaning to these poems--not necessarilly to a gay theme. Again, although very well done, I have to vote no.
March 30, 2013
A nice collection of poems by the translator of two great Italian poets: Montale and Leopardi. But Galassi has his own quiet voice, and it comes through with impressive strength, wit, and humanity in this collection as he details his life and loves in New York, Rome, and elsewhere, especially while, as we like to say now, "changing his orientation" as a lover.
April 17, 2013
Thick with emotion, both staidly coherent and chaotically fluid. The author has described it as a change-of-life collection, meant to be read from beginning to end, unusual for a book of poems. The poems range of raw and organic to almost quaintly antique in their structure.
February 19, 2015
The poems are intense, intelligent, and finely honed, like lines inscribed on knives the author holds to his own throat.
Has anyone noticed that, like Shakespeare's poems, they are addressed variously to a man and to a woman?
Has anyone noticed that, like Shakespeare's poems, they are addressed variously to a man and to a woman?
March 15, 2012
Read my review on New York Journal of Books: http://nyjournalofbooks.com/review/le...
June 18, 2012
Excellent.
June 23, 2012
Simple, gorgeous mid-life angst and revelation.
January 31, 2014
I could do without these.
June 13, 2015
A powerfully lyrical book of 50 poems tracing the course of a love affair. Images alive to nature, the city, and relationships. Masterful.
December 31, 2015
This was uninteresting and kinda confusing to be honest...
April 12, 2014
Best modern poetry book I've read so far.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews