Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

by David Ferry

Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry.

To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption.     

Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From Bewilderment:

October

The day was hot, and entirely breathless, so
The remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fall
Seemed as if it had no cause at all.

The ticking sound of falling leaves was like
The ticking sound of gentle rainfall as
They gently fell on leaves already fallen,

Or as, when as they passed them in their falling,
Now and again it happened that one of them touched
One or another leaf as yet not falling,

Still clinging to the idea of being summer:
As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day,
Had read, and understood, the calendar.

Genres: Poetry

115 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

David Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey in 1924. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and has translated several works from classical languages. Currently he is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, as well as a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University and a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University.

His book of new and selected poems and translations, Of No Country I Know, published in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press, received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

In 2011 he was awarded the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.


He won the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry for Bewilderment.

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know this was a book of poetry when I ordered it. It was on someone’s very interesting list of “Best Books of 2012” and I thought I’d heard the name of David Ferry, but I couldn’t remember where. On Christmas morning, I rose much earlier than everyone else and felt I’d received a very special gift when I pulled out this slim volume to read with my coffee. Then I remembered where I’d seen his name: on the most popular translation of Gilgamesh at my local bookstore.

David Ferry is a learned man who wears his erudition lightly. His understanding of humankind feels deep and ancient and he can write as piercingly of the men of myth as he does of the homeless adrift upon our own streets. The vulnerability he reveals in his poems leaves the reader breathless; his depth of knowledge leaves the reader grateful. I found myself following threads and searching names, recognizing phrases and oft-told stories, lost in the glory of his well-chosen words. After, having made some connection with ancient souls, I was ready to participate in the pageantry of my holiday.

In this collection, Ferry gives us new poems, translations, and poems written in response to the work of other poets. It is a delight from start to finish. A beautiful thing is "Dedication to His Book" by Catullus I, to Cornelius Nepos, or Cavafy's "In Despair." These words are better seen than not seen.

But listen, first, to David Ferry reading "Soul", the poem from which he takes his title. And read of bewilderment by another name: "That Now are Wild and Do Not Remember."

David Ferry won the 2012 National Book Award for this collection. The University of Chicago Press deserves kudos for the beauty of this volume and the quality of the printing.

[Jimmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are one of those people who complain about modern poetry, this is the book that should provide you with plenty of ammunition. About halfway through, my tongue began to slip out of my mouth, drool dribbled out onto a page, and I jumped up shouting, "I'm awake! I'm awake!" Fortunately, no one was around to witness that one.

I am sure Mr. Ferry was a great teacher at Wellesley College. You know the place where peons have to bow down with cries of "I am not worthy!" Actually, Mr. Ferry was not a "teacher." Instead he was "the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English." I wonder if anyone there ever read Jonathan Swift. Can you imagine the field day Swift might have had with that title?

And I am still trying to figure out why I need to read random passages translated from Virgil's Aeneid.

He's been published in all of the great journals, so he must be really good. I wiped off the drool if you want to borrow my copy.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

No doubt there are exceptions and disappointments, but work from a poet of Ferry's stature approaching ninety is almost by definition worth a look. The translations are the main attraction, and worth it (the excerpts from the Georgics especially), but some of the original verse is heartbreaking, though it loses some of its bite as the book goes on. There are a few rhymes throughout, and one striking formal experiment I would have liked to see more of, but this is primarily lyric free verse disciplined through deep acquaintance with the classics.

[Keeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Ferry has a mastery of rhythm and meter that makes his translations of classical verse feel very "right." The same rhythms permeate his original verse; sometimes that works, but sometimes I'm left wondering "why dactyls? Why???"
Some of these poems set up an interesting conceit or exploration of their topic but fail to explore it enough or conclude in a satisfying way ("Narcissus"). Others wander around too much before getting to the point ("Lake Water"). Poems with fewer than five words seem like an indulgence a less famous poet couldn't get away with unless those words carried shattering insight, which these do not ("Untitled").
At the interesting end of the spectrum, "The Offering of Isaac," a translation of a translation of a translation, is really excellent. "Brunswick, Maine, Early Winter, 2000" is searingly effective at transmitting its emotions. The "Reading Arthur Gold's Poem..." series are an interesting experiment in literary criticism in verse, a very Horatian exploit that is a good reminder that poetry can be used for non-lyric purposes. In that same vein, some of the most interesting moments of the collection come when a snippet of a translation is embedded in a poem, as Nietzsche in "Brunswick..." and Goethe in "The Intention of Things." Finally, "The Late-Hour Poem" is delightful, albeit stuck in the wrong century.
All in all, reading this was worth my time, but I will probably not bother to re-read it.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know who David Ferry is, and I wish I could connect more with the poems in this book. A one sentence review would be "Decent, but not my thing."

I think the moment that explained to me why I couldn't came in his response poems to Arthur Gold, where I connected immediately with the AG poems and less so with the DF responses.

The new translations of several classic works were nicely done, and were highlights for me.

A few other favorite moments:
In the Reading Room, online at the Poetry Foundation

Despite saying the response poems are my least favorite, I love the last stanza of "Reading Arthur Gold's Poem 'Chest Cancer:'"
In our consenting, by the ways we spend
Our days obeying the laws of how things are,
We deliver each other up unto the God
Until one day no Ram is caught in the thicket.

The other favorite is clearly an homage to Thomas Wyatt, but I can't find it online anywhere. It is called "That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember."

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Ferry was my best teacher (and the only one of whom I remember a specific lesson) so I am thrilled that he won the National Book Award for poetry with this volume. It is brilliant (in its use of varied metrical schemes and delightfully surprising word use) and sad (in its obvious records of present loss and coming loss). In order, I liked best the poems of personal experience, then the poems in reaction to others' work (Mozart, Arthur Gold, etc.) and then the lively translations. In some poems, he refers to people he loved by their full names, a touching and I think unusual memorial.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fair collection of poetry, with glimpses of brilliance, but the greatest thing about this book is the collection itself: assembling ancient poetry centered around themes of familial loss, rendering it in modern verse, and then weaving a light narrative with original poems interlaced between passages from the Bible and the Aeneid is fantastically charming. This must be the best poetry collection of 2012.

[Salty Swift · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first poetry collection I'd read this year failed to moved me....perhaps one needs to revisit this one multiple times?

[Aseem Kaul · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How many bards gild the lapses of time!", John Keats writes, "But no confusion, no disturbance rude / Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. So the unnumbered sounds that evening store; / the songs of birds - the whispering of the leaves - / the voice of waters - the great bell that heaves / with solemn sound - and thousand others more / that distance of recognizance bereaves, / make pleasing music, and not wild uproar."

That sense of sad harmony pervades David Ferry's sublime new collection, where translations of the great masters sit side by side with Ferry's own poems, each amplifying the elegiac tone of the other. This is most explicit in the sixth section of the book, where Ferry first offers a poem by Arthur Gold (apparently a friend and colleague), then follows it up with a poem of his own that elaborates on Gold's poems. The poems that result are like nothing I've ever read before - at once a homage to a departed mind, a critical close reading, and a profound meditation on the themes of the original text, while still managing to be moving poems in themselves.

Elsewhere the resonances are subtler, so that only a phrase or an image from the original will find its way into Ferry's own work, but the overall sense is of a connection to an unbroken, or rather, a broken but still abiding tradition, of a great depth of feeling, a great sea of human grief, from which these poems are only the latest waves, delivering their fluid messages at one's feet.

What Ferry has created in Bewilderment is something greater than the usual collection of fine lyric (though fine poems are to be found here in multitudes); he has written a great echo chamber of a book, reverberate with voices modern and ancient, all, like Echo, trying to make sense of a loss no less bewildering for being inevitable.

This may be the finest book of new poems published in 2012.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best new collections of poetry I've read in years. It's so nice that Ferry is not only capable of impressive translations (Cavafy, Virgil), but that he can blend in those great old sentiments with his own. There's nothing better than a poet who is keenly aware of classical forms but has matured and relaxed to the point that he uses the forms (and sometimes defies them) rather than vice versa. These are grown up poems, made to illuminate rather than dazzle.

from the Latin of Catullus:

Who is it I should give my little book to,
So pretty in its pumice-polished cover?

Cornelius, I'll give my book to you:
Because you used to think my nothings somethings


from "Brunswick, Maine, Early Winter 2000"

That day when Suzie drove us out to get
The lobsters at the lobster place at the cove:

Bill Moran in the passenger seat of the car,
Doubled as if in a fit of laughter,

A paroxysm of helpless, silent laughter,
At the joke Parkinson's had played on him.

The big joke he simply couldn't get over.


And this last one--perfect:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really intrigued by the way Ferry arranges his poems, so that one poem by Fery responds to or analyzes another poem, either one he has translated here (from Virgil, for example) or else a poem by his friend (?) Arthur Gold that he packs into his own poem. In essence, Ferry's poems are often sort of poetic essays, reading and interpreting the poems he is talking about, and he finds intriguing dimensions in the poems that I hadn't considered before. So, as a thinker about poetry, Ferry has a lot of interest to say.

The themes of the poems themselves are concerned with death and dying-- it's hard not to see this as a response to Ferry's age and looming mortality, as morbid as it is to say something like that. There are some moving poems, early in the book especially, about his wife's passing. But overall, emotionally, Ferry isn't where I am: I am capable, I should hope, of empathizing with someone in Ferry's stage of life. But the appeal of these poems, I think, isn't meant to move you in that way, and for me at least, it didn't.

[Marilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m lured and charmed and made happy by Ferry’s willing self-deprecation. And by his musical ear. And his ability to play out a line of thought further and further…and further, then bring me up short with an unexpected, snappy closure. I like his responses to the old masters like Catullus and not so old masters like Arthur Gold. That he has a live relation to our poet forebears, a relation that flourishes in the 21st century, amazes and charms me. BEWILDERMENT offers us great handfuls of energy, of honesty.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked Ferry's translations of classic works, but I thought his own poems were less interesting in terms of subject matter and imagery. I felt like a lot of them were meandering and pointless. If I were to read one of his books again I would stick with a translation.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

With the exception on one or two, his poems were boring and trivial. But I did enjoy the translations, especially Virgil and Rilke. I appreciate the collection as a whole, he just isn't my style.

[Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book won the 2012 National Book Award for poetry. I'm beginning to realize that all awards are subjective. It was an okay book but I wasn't blown away.

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorites: "In the Reading Room"; "The Late-Hour Poem"; "Virgil, Aeneid VI, Lines 719-61"; "To Where"; "The Birds"

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of original poems and translations has some distinctive elements. Often, a Ferry poem - or, at least, the poems in this collection - will use key words over and over again, giving the poems a looping, echoing quality, as in these first two stanzas from ‘In the Reading Room’ (28):

Alone in the library room, even when others
Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves,
There is the illusion of peace: the air in the room

Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables,
Looking as if they’re reading, looking as if
They’re studying the text, and understanding.

An even more extreme example is the poem ‘One Two Three Four Five’ (5), in which, in each of the poem’s five five-line stanzas, a specific word is used in every line, in the iamb that corresponds to that line’s position in the stanza. So, in the ‘whatever’ stanza, follow the position of the ‘whatever’s:

Whatever it is I think I probably know.
However whatever it is I keep from knowing.
No, it is not whatever I think I know.
Maybe I’ll never know whatever it is.
Some day it has to be figured out. Whatever.

Matching the stylistic looping, this collection also loops thematically, almost obsessively, around loss and grief. Several of the original poems reference images from the translations, and a number of the translations are scenes of loss and destruction from Roman poets, especially Virgil. I respect the skill required to pull this off, though I’m not a fan of Virgil and don’t get a lot out of Roman poetry generally.

But there were several individual poems in this collection that I really like: the translation of Martial I. 101, on the death of the narrator’s young scribe Demetrius (19); ‘October’ (24), obsessively looping around leaves falling; and translations of two Cavafy poems, ‘In Despair’ (39) and ‘Thermopylae’ (44). Two poems late in the book I find particularly moving: ‘Lake Water’ (93), and ‘the White Skunk’ (96). Each at first appears to be a poem about an interesting but external thing: light on the water, a skunk with an oddly-colored hide - but then, a free-standing stanza switches the topic to a memory of a lost loved one, perhaps a spouse, like a deep grief breaking through unbidden when the poet is focused on something else. And then both poems revert to their main subjects, because one can’t give wholly over to grief; the day must go on. It’s amazing to watch these poems operating on both levels at once.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The translator of Horace and Virgil doesn't trouble overmuch the distinction between composition and translation: his translation work from the decades since the 1990s is carefully leading out his verse thoughts and second thoughts about his immortal comrades in the art form of poetry: his wife Anne Ferry (also a poet), his Wellesley colleague Arthur R. Gold (not the Canadian poet Artie Gold, I made that mistake), William Moran, another brother in the language.

Ferry spent decades going over again lines from, say, the Abrahamic books, e.g., Abraham, called by that great Fear, "He girded on his sword, | Fear of the Lord's Word | Continual in his breast." Ferry, a Wordsworth scholar, has the lines from the lovely aubade for the infant Caroline Vallon ("It is a Beauteous Night, Calm and Free"), unable to sleep through the night, near to heart: "Dear Child, Dear Girl, that walkest with me here, | If thou appear untouched by solemn thought |Thy nature is not therefore less divine: | Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year." Going over the poem by his colleague (dead in his fifties) Arthur R. Gold, "On the Beach at Asbury," in which Ferry knows darn well Gold would have heard echoes of Whitman, nonetheless "in this [Gold] poem [the young speaker] was 'lying half asleep' in Abraham's bosom," as "The beauty of it is that the verse proceeds,| knowing these things, as if it didn't know them," the Wordsworth, the Whitman, the translation from the Hebrew relegate, a second order experience that remains in the words brought forward toward Ferry's interpretation of Gold's poem. It's a real poem. Gold's -- "we need real poems," as perhaps it was Pound who said, "it doesn't make a nit of difference who writes them" -- poem is deepened . . . and made necessary? -- its necessity wouldn't have been lost on Gold's grieving colleague -- by Ferry's verse interpretation, "Reading Arthur Gold's Poem 'On the Beach at Asbury'," that is itself a moving poem, even while it doesn't make Gold's original publication a nit's less necessary. Therein lies a mystery that these texts themselves reflect on -- that that range of experience is in, or belongs to, our language.

[robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met this man at the age of 93. The cover says this National Book Award winner is his best book of poems and it was published in his eighties.

The man is ancient but his intelligence is fully intact and his book feels even more ancient than he is. His wife has died and he is wrestling with loss but his mourning isn't eased by a belief in a beautiful afterlife. He is as weak and awed by the mystery of death (or, more fearfully, the non-mystery) as the ancients were.

Along with his translation of Gilgamesh, Ferry here provides the best possible awakening of the ancients for modern readers. He interweaves the poems of Horace, Virgil, and others with his own and they seem to be wrestling with the same philosophical questions he is. There is a feeling of deep dread that overwhelms. We wait to be drug down to the sinister shades. This is not a book for believers, but it is frank and beautiful and loving nonetheless - if you can take it. Bewilderment joins the canon along with Gilgamesh - a lifetime of reading that will go on for those who follow us.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A connoisseur of the word—master of Mesopotamian, Greek and Latin translation, the grief-stricken plaint—and at times, utterly “dislanguaged.”

From “Reading Arthur Gold’s Poem ‘Rome, December 1973’”:
“Just as all others whom we love are Fates,
With whom we share our darkness journey toward
A forgotten destination not yet known.”

From “Lake Water”:
“When, moments after she died, I looked into her face,
It was as untelling as something natural,
A lake, say, the surface unreadable,
Its source of meaning unfindable anymore.
Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;
But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.”

[Robert Risher · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's difficult for me to be critical of this book, because I just...didn't...get it. There were a few poems that I enjoyed, but overall, it's lack of traditional elements of poetry left it hard to handle for me. I can't say it was bad. It just wasn't for me. And that's ok.

[Nicky Enriquez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I should have reread The Aeneid before this.

[Tamara · Rating 2 out of 5]

another Christian Wiman rec that i didn't really connect with. ah well. too obscure i think.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my goals for this year is to read more poetry and be able to think about poetry in more technical ways, rather than just "vibes". David Ferry has been very good for my development of that skill - I find his technical use of rhythm and meter clear without creating the sing-songyness of some poetry. His emotional through lines are clear and powerful. And, when reading his translations or his responses to other poems, the technical aspects become even clearer without a loss of grace.

[Lynsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt that the translations took away from the original poems. I found myself comparing Virgil's and Ferry's words and styles.

Read the review on my blog here.

[Sheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this, and quite frankly am feeling wiped out by its expressions of loneliness and isolation, which I recognize all too well. Especially at this moment of my life. Perhaps it was not the best thing to read. But I can't stop recommending it. Moment after moment of beauty, profound humanity, connection, alienation, dignity, love, admiration, sadness, the timelessness of specificity, the nobility of the human need to share and weep, lament and mourn. Futility and dignity. I'm babbling.

A quick note of how grateful I am to have studied with the English faculty at Wellesley in the 1980s. I was not an English major and am not a writer or poet, but I do feel my sensibility deepened as a result of studying with Frank Bidart, David Ferry, and Arthur Gold. And learning from Robert Polito, the new Director of the Poetry Society of America (or Poetry Foundation, I forget the exact title). I may not create anything, but I do appreciate.

BEWILDERMENT I truly appreciated.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Ferry is a gifted genius of a poet (and translator). This collection was exquisite, and I am now enamoured with his verse. Ferry's melancholic tone and empathetic eye challenge the reader to acknowledge what we all know but rarely address: life is fleeting - often nonsensical - filled with beauty, riddled with narcissists, and awaiting exploration. I loved this collection, and although I felt grounded in my own recognition of mortality all around, from flower to friend to family to me, Ferry left me also feeling there is a possible promise that somebody someday will indeed learn how to fly, be saved, or remember just the right thing at exactly the right time.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read before bed every night, and reading this collection was a lovely way to end the day. The problem was I felt compelled to disrupt my comfort repeatedly to copy lines onto paper (can't write in a library book).

I found the mix of translations, poems, and responses to poems (includes the original in the text) to be such a treat. The translations were amazing. This is the Virgil (etc.) we should learn as students.

The juxtaposition of poems was powerful. Word choice and language were masterful. The subjects and themes were moving.

Brilliant collection.

[B E Kristl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely magnificent. It seems that David Ferry has effortlessly woven passages from Virgil and Horace with his own quiet, understated, but so very powerful, verse. This is not Garrison Keillor's poetry - most of us need to read it again and again because you will hear and feel it differently every time. Ferry's poetry has always been sublime, but taken with carefully selected passages from his own translations of the classics, there are no words for it. I am entirely dislanguaged.

[Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the poems in here were interesting and engaging. Others not so much, but that doesn't bother me. Unlike novels I often think a poetry collection as very good if it only contains a couple impressive poems. I would definitley be interested in reading more of Ferry's work, and may already have done so, but simply don't remember it.