What Was Lost: Poems

by Herbert Morris

Overview

In this collection, Herbert Morris gathers 15 poems in his two signature modes, the dramatic monologue and the meditative reverie. His subjects include a resplendent apricot gown once worn by Lillian Gish (Chaplin enthralled, Griffith smitten, ecstatic); a poignant human detail in Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac; and a host of variations on the Peaceable Kingdom, the obsessive lifework of the painter Edward Hicks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582430645
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/16/2000
Pages:	132
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Herbert Morris is the author of three previous books of poems, Peru, Dream Palace, and The Little Voices of the Pears.

What People are Saying About This

Anthony Hecht

Anthony Hecht

Here is a major book composed boldly and carefully of major poems, with not a slight one among them. Beginning with a dramatic monologue spoken with all the qualifications, the delicately nuanced and reconsidered hesitations, of Henry James, that same voice bedazzles us in poem after poem as we enter paintings by Hopper and Hicks and Caravaggio, the curious glamour of the world of film, and the glamour of political figures--Roosevelt and Kennedy--caught fleetingly in the cameras of the press. In all these poems the interaction of life and art is Herbert Morris's passionate concern.

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick

In a time when much American poetry tends toward the sparse and the lax, having more in common with e-mail than with the oceanic resources of language, the work of Herbert Morris rushes in as antidote and resurgence. Here are the long rich lines, the scalloped cadences, the galloping drive of word and vision that we once knew when the true poets ruled. Morris's orchestral force renews our pleasure in the Wordsworthian art of meditation pulsing with musical invention.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Herbert Morris is...so leisurely as he draws the thread through his labyrinthine thought, yet so passionate, so precise and tender....With the force of his love of language, he truly makes it new.