M and Other Poems

by John Peck

Overview

John Peck is a member of the remarkable generation of poets, including Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, and James McMichael, who studied with Yvor Winters at Stanford in the 1960s. His recent work expresses a sharp sense of vulnerability and of the tenacity of human life, both natural and moral.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810150560
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	10/23/1996
Edition description:	1
Pages:	90
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

John Peck was born in Pittsburgh in 1941. He taught literature at American and Swiss universities and trained as an analytical psychologist in Zurich. His collection The Broken Blockhouse Wall (Carcanet, 1979) won the Prix de Rome, and his other works include Argura (Sheep Meadow, 1998). He lives in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Notes and Acknowledgments
Woods Burial
Autumn Syllabics on Themes from Horace and the Chinese Masters
So the Name of That Place Was Taberah
Night-Blooming Cereus
Anasazi, Ancient Enemies
Getting at What Happens
Wine of the Solitaries
Little Fugue
Occam's Razor Pledges No Hostages to Fortune
Monument
Attic Canzonetta
Soundless Tune in the Jewel
First Things 
Vestigium Pedis
Hanging Figures
Frère Jacques, Frère Antoine
Polybius
Igitur, Itaque, Donque, Donc
Tombeau for Vernon Watkins
Trio Threaded on Lines from the Parthian Hymns

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Viaticum
For a Small Chorus
Ave
From the Headland at Cumae
Memorandum
Relay Octets

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M

Editorial Reviews

Peck's difficult collections do not appear often. More than 10 years separate 1978's The Broken Blockhouse Wall from 1991's Poems and Translations of Hi-Lo, the middle pair of his four volumes. However, the poems in 1993's Argura and in this new volume suggest that Peck has become more comfortable-and prolific-with his stylistic combination of elements from two heroes: the detailed imagery of Ezra Pound and the conceptual coherence of Yvor Winters. In this volume, Peck is grittier than he has ever been. In "So the Name of that Place Was Taberah," he juxtaposes the vast reach of Chicago's slaughterhouses with the vulnerable core of an individual: "stench from the slaughterhouses steaming east,/ black bascules yawning above acid, the brain's imbalances like yeast// ...biography eclipsed in the black chantry of childhood, and second sight/ in slag with its magma suns under looming gantries." The final piece in this collection, "M: A Poem in Ten Chapters and One Thousand Lines," is an exhaustive-and sometimes exhausting-account of some of the poet's travels, especially through France and Italy, that reveals the ways that the poet's "double will shake off his gray cloud, the phantom/ of what I had been greeting the unknown that I am." Peck's densely allusive and highly cerebral work rewards the rigorous reading that it demands. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Peck has established himself . . . as a major poet, opening up territory no one else has attempted."
—Clive Wilmer, Times Literary Supplement



"The gift for making language itself into feeling rather than merely feeling's vehicle is just that, a gift. Peck has it." —Poetry



"Peck is one of the best poets in the country, and M is his masterpiece." —Notre Dame Review

"Peck's densely allusive and highly cerebral work rewards the rigorous reading that it demands." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher