In his twelfth book of original verse, David R. Slavitt leads us to a crossroads where terror, loneliness, and despair are transfigured by love and art. Throughout this collection David Slavitt's keen intelligence, wry humor, and deep compassion shine through.

A satiric tale of human weakness and spiritual growth concerns John Smith, a failed writer and third-rate professor who steals another professor's place at an artists' colony in Italy and finds himself dealing with pretentious bores and a disappearing poet.

Looks at the life and work of Lorenzo Da Ponte in a poem, including his early conversion to Catholicism and an insincere stint as a priest, his dealings with Casanova, and his best-known achievement--the writing of the libretto for Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

This work provides translations of epigrams by 16th-century Welsh academic John Owen, including Duessa's Version: A Dirge in Seven Canticles, which offers an irreverent recapitulation of The Faerie Queene.

This is a collection of poems, translations, imitations, and parodies which range from the grief-stricken brooding to exuberant clowning around. The title is the author's Library of Congress identification, which he adopts now that it has adopted him.

Falling from Silence is the seventy-third book by David Slavitt, the prolific poet, translator, and editor. His amazing rate of production has only amplified and refined the power of his art. This is the work of an accomplished veteran, a craftsman who laments the limitations of what his hard-earned talent can do in the face of age and loss. He turns to religion, reads the classics, and in moments of cheer that may not be mere mania, he horses around and fools with the words that have been his toys, but nothing helps - or, more accurately, nothing helps enough. It is nevertheless true that,...

"A wonderfully disorienting title for a wonderfully orienting book. Deeply instructive, entirely delightful."-Henry Taylor The prodigiously imaginative mind and penetrating wit of David R. Slavitt are on full display in his newest collection of poetry that is perhaps his most engaging to date. The title poem begins by fooling around-"With three names like that, it sounds as though his mother is calling him and she's really angry"-but then builds into a shrewd, thoughtful account of the life of the ninth U.S. president. A second long poem offers a fresh and very amusing appraisal of the...

This bilingual edition introduces readers to the sixteenth century poet Jean de Sponde, considered one of the most important poets of the Renaissance period and a precursor to Donne, in his poetry Sponde reflects the tensions--both stylistic and philosophical-of his time. This collection of sonnets, abounding in metaphor, paradox, antithesis, and hyperbole, is a restless personal exploration of the body and the spirit, of the concrete and the abstract, of passion and anguish.