The Transparent Man

by Anthony Hecht

The author's first book in eleven years, this collection includes a narrative poem recalling the devastating breakup of a marriage, and a chamber music poem based on a Haydn quartet and the lovers from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 1990

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing you notice about Anthony Hecht’s poetry is how old school it is. It rhymes! It scans! It’s witty! Oh, alright, not ha-ha witty, but witty in the involved and metaphysical manner of a degenerate Cavalier (and I mean that in a nice way). Here are a couple of specimen stanzas from a poem called “The Riddle”:

Where the wind listeth, there the sailboats list,
Water is touched with a light case of hives
Or wandering gooseflesh. The strange power and gist
Of whatever it is that animates our lives

Scrawls with a lavish hand its signature
Of ripples gathered into folds and pleats
As indecipherable, chiselled, pure
And everlasting as the name of Keats.

That reference to Keats seems gratuitous - until you recall the famous epitaph, and then you can only cluck your tongue, shake your head and mutter,‘Why, you clever little monkey, you!’

And that’s the one complaint I have against Hecht: he’s almost too good, too rhetorically facile. His stuff is so uniformly rich and buttery that reading it for any length of time is like gorging on wedding cake. (Then again, almost every poet makes me want to throw up sooner or later, so take my philistinism into account, please).

Still, anyone seriously interested in the craft of poetry, as opposed to incontinent wanking, needs to check this guy out.

[Jessica (JT) Thelen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really struggled through this one. Not my style of poetry at all.

[David Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regarding "See Naples and Die", on pg. 33, in the denouement of this long poem, Hecht describes the dissolution of his marriage. I found it especially affecting for the obvious reason that my wife has just divorced me. His poem is moving in how it captures a dark, interior mood. It captures despair. The thing is that we're not just a series of moods and the promise of marriage should never ride on such moods, but rather in the commitment to bridging them.

Regarding "A Love for Four Voices", in it he writes, "…Patterns of happy prospect, drawn from the blent/ Breath-taking features of a cherished face…" He captures some of the sweetness of love in its infancy. "…in the fixed future, where neither glance shall linger/ Nor pulse nor god prevail." He likes to describe divorce in terms of fate, but the surrender to these terms of course is the abnegation of the marriage vow. Many prefer to be the slaves of fate rather than to dwell in Christian freedom. "If life is brief, that sex is even briefer, / Its joys like the illusions of a reefer/ Decaying from the moment they're begun/ And scarcely worthy of such struggle and fuss." Well, there's certainly truth to that- let the votives of the god be scandalized.

[Jacob Moose]

Meditation
“The orchestra tunes up, each instrument
In lunatic monologue putting on its airs,
Oblivious, haughty, full of self-regard.
The flute fingers its priceless strand of pearls,
Nasal disdain is eructed by the horn,
The strings let drop thin overtones of malice,
Inchoate, like the dense garbling of voices
At a cocktail party, which the ear sorts out
By alert exclusions, keen selectivities.
A five-way conversation, at its start
Smooth and intelligible as a Brahms quintet,
Disintegrates after one's third martini
To dull orchestral nonsense, the jumbled fragments
Of domestic friction in a foreign tongue,
Accompanied by a private sense of panic:
This surely must be how old age arrives,
Quite unannounced, when suddenly one fine day
Some trusted faculty has gone forever.”