Daryl Hine

Beginning with his first poem appearing in a literary journal at age 14, acclaimed Canadian-American poet Daryl Hine published eleven books of verse over a fifty-three year period - many now long out of print. This book presents Hine's own selection of his best collected and uncollected lyric poems, including that first poem, thematically divided into four sections - art, love, place, and time. Internationally celebrated for his translations and his poetry, Hine's virtuoso attention to form and the resonance of his details make these poems some of the finest written in the English language. This collection includes an introduction by the author. For his control of learning and wit I can think of few poets alive who can approach him. There are very few poets as good as Daryl Hine and almost none like him." -- John Hollander "I cannot tell how it is that Daryl Hine knows so much, but it is his poetry which knows. . . his poetry does the telling. If that is what it means to be civilized, witty, playful and urbane. . . such provocations afford us access to experience in a heightened register, a major key." -- Richard Howard ". . . there is a heroic sense in these poems of a need to parry the world's onslaughts with steely verbal elegance. . . typical of his civilized erotic self-criticism, somewhat elevated in traditional form. . . I find him sometimes a slightly disconcerting blend of openness and fastidiousness. . . frequently, touching, exact, musical and evocative." -- John Fuller, T.L.S. "Hine is a superb poetic craftsman. . . a 'geographer of the word'. . . one is overwhelm-ingly aware of these poems as poems." -- Barry Cameron, Canadian Literature

Winner of the 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, highly acclaimed poet and translator Daryl Hine brings to life the words of Hesiod and the world of Archaic Greece. While most available versions of these early Greek writings are rendered in prose, Hine's illuminating translations represent these early classics as they originally appeared, in verse. Since prose was not invented as a literary medium until well after Hesiod's time, presenting these works as poems more closely approximates not only the mechanics but also the melody of the originals.This volume includes Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, two of the oldest non-Homeric poems to survive from antiquity. Works and Days is in part a farmer's almanac—filled with cautionary tales and advice for managing harvests and maintaining a good work ethic—and Theogony is the earliest comprehensive account of classical mythology—including the names and genealogies of the gods (and giants and monsters) of Olympus, the sea, and the underworld. Hine brings out Hesiod's unmistakable personality; Hesiod's tales of his escapades and his gritty and persuasive voice not only give us a sense of the author's own character but also offer up a rare glimpse of the everyday life of ordinary people in the eighth century BCE.In contrast, the Homeric Hymns are more distant in that they depict aristocratic life in a polished tone that reveals nothing of the narrators' personalities. These hymns (so named because they address the deities in short invocations at the beginning and end of each) are some of the earliest examples of epyllia, or short stories in the epic manner in Greek.This volume unites Hine's skillful translations of the Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns—along with Hine's rendering of the mock-Homeric epic The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice—in a stunning pairing of these masterful classics.

Daryl Hine, a Canadian poet who has travelled widely, frequently records in his verse the quality of this travelling and the characteristics of the places he has visited. None of these places has he described more precisely and more poignantly than Paris, where he lived for several years as a young man. Arrondissements is the most complete of his comments on the French capital. At once a dream-promenade, an erotic tale, and a meditation on beauty's many forms, this brilliant suite of poems evokes a great city, quartier by quartier, and once again demonstrates the mastery of the poet who devised it.