James Laughlin

xxi, 262 pages ; 22 cm

The poetry of the late James Laughlin (1914-97) spans a period of over sixty years, from the first verses written in his signature "typewriter" metric to the most recent pieces that open his Poems New and Selected. Laughlin reveals himself in his poems as a master of concision, of the well-placed word that penetrates the human heart. Over two hundred and twenty five poems included here show his technical brilliance as well: in short- and long-line poems; in the three-stress verses of his autobiographical "Byways"; in "Epigrams," amatory and otherwise, and "Pentastichs"; in idiosyncratic "(American) French" poems and their translations of his own devising.

James Laughlin (1914-97) was a poet of distinction as well as the founding publisher of New Directions. A Commonplace Book of Pentastichs, the last book of his own that he helped to prepare, is a compilation of 249 poems composed in a five-line stanza form first introduced in The Secret Room (1997). A note to "Thirty-nine Pentastichs" in that earlier volume explains: "A 'pentastich' refers simply to a poem of five lines, without regard to metrics. The present selection is of recent short-line compositions in natural voice cadence, many of them marginal jottings and paraphrases of commonplace book notations." Here, then, are armchair marginalia and apercus to be savored at random.

In The Enlacement, he writes: "There's something holy about / falling asleep pressed close / against a beloved ... one body a sanctuary for another / the enlacement's vow for the future / a pledge not to be broken."

A lifetime of memories, a lifetime of writing, a lifetime of publishing (since 1936) - what to do, how to say it, what is the organic form? If you are James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, poet and friend of poets, you adapt the narrative metric of one friend (Kenneth Rexoth) to tell the very personal stories of your other friends with verve, compassion, and a shrewd eye to the emotional truth of complex relationships. You call the whole memoir Byways, parts of which have begun to appear in literary journals. But one part stands alone in your affections. The section Remembering William Carlos Williams grows of its own accord and captures a relationship so perfectly that you decide to do it up as a little book and share it with a few friends who, like the late James Merrill, are enchanted. To reach a wider audience, Remembering William Carlos Williams is now available in this New Directions Paperbook Original edition.

James laughlin, with this collection, takes his place as one of the most original and accomplished contemporary American poets. With Laughlin, clarity is paramount. He uses no excess decoration. He has been called the best living love poet, celebrating Eros in its many forms. And at eighty years of age he writes of old age and death as few have. In recent years Laughlin has explored new metrical directions, such as the fastpaced colloquial rhythms of personal narrative in Byways, his work-in-progress, now offered in book form for the first time. This last section of The Country Road is notable for the revelation of this form.

In the literary world James Laughlin is best known as the publisher of New Directions Books. But he has also been a dedicated poet. His work is both modern - rich in technical experiment - and ancient - grounded in the Greek and Latin poets. Guy Davenport has called Laughlin "a very ironic Roman poet, and a very salty Greek one. Which is not to say that he imitates anybody, or offers plaster casts of antiquities. He is the youngest and most modern poet now writing in the United States. He is the real thing." Laughlin describes himself as a writer of light verse. He can be witty but underneath the wit there are often pungent truths about the human condition. His work is notable for its range of subject matter, the originality of its invention, his restoration of the classical tradition, his wordplay, his satire, and the intensity of his love poems. Few poets have dealt with the quandaries of love so acutely since Rochester and Herrick. "Who else today," asks the critic Marjorie Perloff, "writes such bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstacy to loss"? This volume collects Laughlin's poems from 1935 to 1993. His Random Stories and Random Essays are also published by Moyer Bell.

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevates his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war - Laughlin's muse speaks of all these things with a fresh directness that makes his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin's efforts as publisher and poet have been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him is, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a "continuous present" in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin's doppelganger, Hiram Handspring. The Man in the Wall follows Laughlin's recent Collected Poems (Moyer Bell Limited).

48 pages ; 21 cm