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    Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
    Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
    Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

    By David Ferry

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. “This is one of the great books of poetry of this young century.”—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
     
    To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century.
     
    Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption.     

    Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them.
     
    “These poems highlight an age-old quest for truth that leads the speaker to consider his present and past, and to translate works by Horace, Virgil, Catullus and others . . . vivid and sometimes heartbreaking.”—The Washington Post


    “Astonishing—a haunted book where ghosts prove that the haunted are still alive and allow for the continuing company of literature.”—Slate
     
    “A necessary book . . . shocking and heartbreaking.”—The Rumpus
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 5, 2012
    ISBN9780226244907
    Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
    Author

    David Ferry

    David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh, is a poet and translator who has also won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.

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      Book preview

      Bewilderment - David Ferry

      One

      NARCISSUS

      There's the one about the man who went into

      A telephone booth on the street and called himself up,

      And nobody answered, because he wasn't home,

      So how could he possibly have answered the phone?

      The night went on and on and on and on.

      The telephone rang and rang and nobody answered.

      And there's the one about the man who went

      Into the telephone booth and called himself up,

      And right away he answered, and so they had

      A good long heart-to-heart far into the night.

      The sides of the phone booth glittered and shone in the light

      Of the streetlight light as the night went echoing on.

      Out in the wild hills of suburban New Jersey,

      Up there above South Orange and Maplewood,

      The surface of a lonely pond iced over,

      Under the avid breath of the winter wind,

      And the snow drifted across it and settled down,

      So at last you couldn't tell that there was a pond.

      FOUND SINGLE-LINE POEMS

      Turning Eighty-Eight, a Birthday Poem:

                  It is a breath-taking, near-death, experience.

      Found poem:

                  You ain't seen Nothing yet.

      Found poem:

                  We're all in this apart.

      A Subtitle:

                  Playing With My Self

      ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE

      anger

      Anger is what I don't know what to do with.

      I know it was anger was the trouble that other time.

      I don't know where the anger came from, that time,

      Or where it was I was going on anger's back

      On a mission to somewhere to get me through the danger.

      whatever

      Whatever it is I think I probably know.

      However whatever it is I keep from knowing.

      No, it is not whatever I think I know.

      Maybe I'll never know whatever it is.

      Some day it has to be figured out. Whatever.

      somebody

      Somebody's got to tell me the truth some day.

      And if somebody doesn't tell me the truth I'll tell it.

      On my block there was somebody knew the truth, I think.

      Or so I thought. Anyway somebody knew

      That trying to tell the truth is looking for somebody.

      isn't

      If it isn't anywhere I guess it isn't.

      But if it isn't why do I think it is?

      I guess there really isn't any way

      For me to find out what is or isn't there

      In the black night where it either was or wasn't.

      where

      Where was it I was looking in the past?

      It isn't where I've looked, that's no surprise.

      I don't know what or where it is or was.

      But maybe it isn't so much the where but the why.

      Or maybe I haven't found it because beware.

      SOUL

      What am I doing inside this old man's body?

      I feel like I'm the insides of a lobster,

      All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic

      Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment,

      And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what,

      God knows, vague memories of friends, and what

      They said last night, and seeing, outside of myself,

      From here inside myself, my waving claws

      Inconsequential, wavering, and my feelers

      Preternatural, trembling, with their amazing

      Troubling sensitivity to threat;

      And I'm aware of and embarrassed by my ways

      Of getting around, and my protective shell.

      Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as

      This cold sea water's washing over my back?

      UNTITLED

      without

      not any

      THE INTENTION OF THINGS

      The death that lives in the intention of things

      To have a meaning of some sort or other,

      That means to come to something in the end,

      It is the death that lives not finding the meaning

      Of this or that object as it moves among them

      Uncertainly, moving among the shadows,

      The things that are like shadows, shadows of things,

      The things the shadows of shadows, all in the effort

      To put off the death that we are coming to.

      The intention makes its way among its moments,

      Choosing this object or that, uncertainly,

      Somebody's body or the leaves of a tree

      On a summer night in a landscape somewhere else,

      Under which something happened that made it different.

      It is seeking to find the meaning of what they are.

      But it moves uncertainly among them, the shadows,

      The things that are like shadows, putting off

      The death that is coming, that we are coming to.

      It is the death that lives that makes the flower

      Be what it's going to be and makes it die,

      And makes the musical phrase complete itself,

      Or fail to complete itself, as Goethe said,

      Writing a friend whose son had died in the Army:

      "So you have had another terrible

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