Dante in China

Description

In John Barr's poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world. Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: "Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful." Bach's final fugue informs all of nature. Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan. Aristotle finds "Demagogues are the insects of politics

John Barr was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in a rural township outside of Chicago. Graduating from Harvard College on a Navy scholarship, he served five years on ships including three tours to Vietnam. Over a thirty-year career as an investment banker, he was Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and founded three startups. He has taught in the Graduate Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College and served on the boards of Yaddo, Bennington College, and the Poetry Society of America, the latter two as board chair. In 2004, he was appointed the inaugural president of the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and served in that capacity for a decade. Dante in China is his ninth collection of poems. He lives in Connecticut.

"John Barr has a naturalist's flair for identifying and naming the more curious phenomena and events of experience. He is a master builder. He is learned enough to wear his learning lightly. Thought and feeling flow in and out of each other with a beautiful fluency in his poems, and they balance each other perfectly. Most wonderful of all, he has a deep sonic wisdom and creates palaces of sound where we can sit and listen and listen."-Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 3 Sections "W. H. Auden once longed for the return of a 'civic poetry,' by which he meant two things: a poetry whose subjects would be interesting to people who had no primary investment in the art, and a poetry that managed to entertain and instruct at the same time. How happy Auden might have been with this inventive, various, and large-spirited book by John Barr! I hope it finds the wide audience it certainly deserves."-Christian Wiman, author of Once in the West, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award "The book's powerfully imagined final poem, 'Aristotle's Will,' is like nothing in our poetry. It is both historical and fictional-comic, hilarious, deeply ironic, and at the same time earnest, heartbreaking, instructive. It is about fathers and sons, teachers and students, arrogance, ignorance, lessons learned, lessons wasted, the indecency of power, the passion, the compassion, the loss. It is a wonderful work."-Ilya Kaminsky, co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry