Flight Among the Tombs, Anthony Hecht's sixth book of poems published since 1954, shows one of America's foremost poets working at the top of his form. Part scholar, part circus ringmaster, Hecht calls our attention to three rings of his erudition: classical wit, Renaissance energy, and contemporary doubt. A fragment of Christopher Smart provides the book's title, but George Herbert, in whose clever prosodic vineyards Hecht has long labored, casts the book's longest shadow. The first half contains lyrical poems in which Death--both scythe-hauling figure and physical phenomenon--speaks as the central character inside a collage of masks: carnival barker, film director, society lady, member of the Harlem Guild of St. Luke, and, of course, poet. Hilarious and creepy, the poems combine Hecht's late-modernist sense of ironic humor with an orchestra of Latin and Renaissance conceits, stripping away the latter's theology to express a very inclusive mortality. Yet Hecht, whose deep humanity prevents these poems from becoming mere set pieces of the macabre, turns this message of doom into a call to enjoy the unpredictable in life, as the speaker watching aristocrats dine says in "Death the Mexican Revolutionary," We recommend the quail,
Which you'd do well to eat
Before your powers fail,
For I inaugurate
A brand-new social order
Six cold, decisive feet
South of the border.
Several occasional poems in the book's second half mark the passing of Hecht's generation, including "For James Merrill: An Adieu" and "A Death in Winter," honoring the memory of Joseph Brodsky. These poems are particularly moving in light of the rambunctious sensibility of the volume's first half. At turns outrageous and somber, Flight Among the Tombs is a surprising addition to Hecht's oeuvre. --Edward Skoog


From Library Journal
This volume gathers all the poems published by Pulitzer Prize-winning Hecht since the appearance of The Transparent Man (LJ 6/15/90), but it is best understood as a supplement to the majestic progress of the Collected Earlier Poems (Knopf, 1990); it shares the earlier work's preoccupation with matters of mortality and history, and, like that volume, this features a poetic sequence illustrated by Leonard Baskin's unnerving wood engravings. That sequence, "Presumptions of Death," is perhaps the last and strangest instantiation of the Danse Macabre, for in it Death not only draws us out of every condition and stage of life but meets us there, perfectly disguised as one of ourselves. A variety of lyrics, including elegies for fellow poets James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky, round out the volume. Hecht's bitterly melodious lines perfectly express the rich ruminations of an outstanding poet; he is, like the camel of his poem, "the royal pattern of patience,/ and wisdom's legate." Highly recommended.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Hecht is often ranked among such luminaries as W. H. Auden and James Merrill, an assessment based on his adroitness with form, classical frame of reference, and suppleness of thought and imagination. These traits are evident in this striking, two-part volume. The first section, "Presumptions of Death," consists of a collaboration between Hecht and artist Leonard Baskin, whose wood engravings illustrate a remarkably ironic series of poems written from death's point of view. Hecht's grim reaper takes many shapes: an inquisitor, a whore, an archbishop, a painter, an Oxford don, a Mexican revolutionary, a film director, and a carnival barker. Whatever his guise, he is always amused, assuring us that "I shall press to the core of every secret. / There is no match for my patience." These visions of death are at once wickedly clever and quite unsettling. The remainder of the book contains new poems on various subjects, but death haunts those pages, too, as Hecht bids adieu to soul mates James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky. Donna Seaman


Review
"Anthony Hecht's majestic development into a great poet has progressed across half-a-century. Flight Among the Tombs is his poignant and ironic masterpiece. With this book, he clearly becomes a fourth in the sequence of John Crowe Ransom, W.H. Auden and James Merrill--great verse-artists who are also humanist sages and wise sensibilities. Few poets stand with Henry James and Marcel Proust: Ransom, Auden, Merrill and Hecht are in that company."
--Harold Bloom


Review
"Anthony Hecht's majestic development into a great poet has progressed across half-a-century. Flight Among the Tombs is his poignant and ironic masterpiece. With this book, he clearly becomes a fourth in the sequence of John Crowe Ransom, W.H. Auden and James Merrill--great verse-artists who are also humanist sages and wise sensibilities. Few poets stand with Henry James and Marcel Proust: Ransom, Auden, Merrill and Hecht are in that company."
--Harold Bloom

ANNOTATION

Divided into two parts, this new book contains a collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin called "Presumptions of Death, " reproducing 22 masterly wood engravings and all of Hecht's other poems written since his last book, The Transparent Man.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The first half of this volume, "The Presumptions of Death," accompanied by Leonard Baskin's wood engravings, is composed of two parts. In the first, Death speaks in his own person, though in differing moods and attitudes. In the second - in a variation from the medieval tradition of The Dance of Death in which he invites various members of society to dance with him, here he adopts the very identities of those - whore, society lady, scholar, film director - he means to embrace. The poet's hope has been to attain as wide a variety of tone and character as possible, from top to bottom of the social scale, from levity to pathos, contempt to sympathy. The second part of the book, "Proust on Skates," expands on the themes and tones of the first part, and includes elegies for two admired contemporary poets (James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky) and a variety of other poems that resonate with notes of frailty and mortality, though an undertone of humor is rarely far away.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal