Four Seasons

Description

Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau; from Keats, Blake and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Amy Clampitt. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost's tribute to the evanescence of spring in 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' to Langston Hughes's moody 'Summer Night' in Harlem; from the 'stopped woods' in Marie Ponsot's 'End of October' to the chilling 'mind of winter' in Wallace Stevens's 'The Snow Man', the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage with the world outside ourselves.

J. D. McClatchy is the author of four earlier books of poems, Scenes from Another Life (1981), Stars Principal (1986), The Rest of the Way (1990), and Ten Commandments (1998). His literary essays are collected in White Paper (1989) and Twenty Questions (1998). He is the editor of The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1990) and The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (1996), as well as a co-editor of James Merrill's Collected Poems (2001) and Collected Novels and Plays (2002). The author of several opera libretti, McClatchy is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Yale University and is editor of The Yale Review.