Description
Praise
“Again, again one returns to Weinfield’s verses for their musical resonance, intellectual incisiveness,
unflinching wit, and inescapable relevance: they are companions to be treasured.” – Allen Mandelbaum
An Excerpt
Slowly the seasons circle and converge.
Summer’s assumptions fall beneath the surge
Of wind that widens in its withering.
Late-winter blurring into early-spring
Summons the Wanderer in his own blood,
Bursts through whatever bulwarks had withstood
The pulse of passion rushing to the void –
Till all delineations are destroyed.
Why should the Wanderer pursue his course,
Season by season, searching for a source,
And slowly circle like an old refrain
From east to west and west to east again –
Summer to autumn; autumn, winter; spring –
If nothing comes of all his wandering?
Author
Henry Weinfield is the author of The Sorrows of Eros and Other Poems (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) and of three other collections of poetry. His verse-translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, done in collaboration with Catherine Schlegel, is available from the University of Michigan Press and his translation of Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet sequence, The Chimeras, with monoprints by the artist Douglas Kinsey, from Spuyten-Duyvil. He is the author of a translation of and commentary on the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (University of California Press, 1995) and of a critical study, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History (Southern Illinois UP, 1991). His book, The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press,” and he is working on a study of the blank-verse tradition in English poetry from Milton to Stevens. Henry Weinfield is professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
