Plundered Hearts

Starred review from February 24, 2014
“You who read this too will die./ None loved his life as much as I,” we read early in this big, sometimes stark, sometimes surprising new volume, the first U.S. selected and seventh volume of poems from the urbane, serious poet, editor, critic, and librettist (Hazmat). Certainly it confirms his place in a line of deft writers adroit with inherited forms, with complex sentences, with modern love (especially same-sex love): W.H. Auden and James Merrill, Ovid and Horace, Anthony Hecht, and Elizabeth Bishop receive homage direct and indirect. A crown of sonnets, a copious knowledge of opera, blank verse, syllabics, trimeter couplets, and intricate stanzas make the book a kind of cyclopedia of forms. Yet the poems—especially the newer ones—also show what sets McClatchy apart: “What happens when the language is a mask/ And the words we use to hush this up have failed?” Deciding “the poem always has a shadow/ Under its reliefs,” betraying his adult reserve “With that singular lack of shame only a kid commands,” in narrative verse and in epigrams, McClatchy concedes the frailty of the body, the frangibility and the stubbornness of desire, making him a poet of modern mortality (as in the new poem “My Robotic Prostatectomy”). It is an unflinching, uncommonly serious as well as a technically careful performance.

February 15, 2014

This lengthy "definitive selection" spans three decades of McClatchy's career--six published volumes of verse as well as new, uncollected poems. A prodigious editor (Yale Review), translator, author of 13 opera libretti, and Yale University professor, McClatchy is a disciple of W.H. Auden and James Merrill. He departs from their formal subtleties, however, with a confessional flourish that writes gay sexuality into the human drama, depicting "love's brutal task/ And the overmastered scream it ends in." Some strong poems involve body parts: a Palestinian goat head vendor, a science center heart large enough to stand in, a diabetes-numbed toe, a collection of hands, the penis through history. McClatchy's favorite meter is not rhymed pentameter but syllabics, a looser counted form derived from the classical Greek and Latin poetry he adores. When estranged lovers in a rented house can feed a feral cat but not each other, the poem's backdrop is an opera of wailing animals so well orchestrated that one can almost agree that "without suffering, life would be unbearable." VERDICT A collection of rough, erudite meditations on the betrayals of the body in youth and age that will appeal to McClatchy fans and sophisticated readers of poetry. [See "What's Coming for National Poetry Month in April?" Prepub Alert, 11/18/13.]--Ellen Kaufman, New York

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