Flight Among the Tombs: Poems

by Anthony Hecht, Leonard Baskin (Illustrator)

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

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 1996

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flight Among the Tombs is not in the same league as Hecht's earlier collection, The Hard Hours, though I should probably tack on an extra star for Leonard Baskin's fantastic wood engravings which accompany the poems in the collection's first section. Flight Among the Tombs is intended as an updated Danse Macabre, with poems representing Death in a number of guises. Problem is, I found some of these "updated" guises dated (as was the case with Death, "The Mexican Revolutionary," which had me recalling Katherine Anne Porter's 1920s story, "Flowering Judas"). Overall, it just seemed like a workmanlike effort from an aging poet. Such a reading reaction really flies in the face of Harold Bloom's ridiculously overblown praise on the cover blurb, but I feel comfortable with that, since this is now the second time I've read this collection. However, there is one remarkable poem that jumped out at me, "Death the Copperplate Printer." The poems ends with this powerful and dark image of despair -- and, faintly, Faith:

Slowly I crank my winch, and the bones crack,
The skull splits open and the ribs give way.
Who, then, thinks to endure?
Confess the artistry of my attack;
Admire the fine gravure,
The trenched darks, the cross-hatching, the pale gray.

This is no metaphor. Margaret Clitherow,
A pious woman, even as she prayed
Was cheated of her breath
By a court verdict that some years ago
Ordered her pressed to death.
I'm always grateful for such human aide.

Whew! Now for (Saint) Margaret Clitherow, those were truly Hard Hours. I suppose copperplate printers are pretty much outdated now, but in this case it doesn't matter, since the language leaps over that potential complaint. Unfortunately this great poem had no company in this collection.

[Jacob Moose]

Death the Hypocrite

You claim to loathe me, yet everything you prize
Brings you within the reach of my embrace.
I see right through you though I have no eyes;
You fail to know me even face to face.

Your kiss, your car, cocktail and cigarette,
Your lecheries in fancy and in fact,
Unkindnesses you manage to forget,
Are ritual prologue to the final act

And certain curtain call. Nickels and dimes
Are but the cold coin of a realm that's mine.
I'm the acute accountant of your crimes
As of your real estate. Bristlecone pine,

Whose close-ringed chronicles mock your regimen
Of jogging, vitamins, and your strange desire
To disregard your assigned three-score and ten
Yields to my absolute instrument of fire.

You know me, friend, as Faustus, Baudelaire,
Boredom, Self-Hatred, and, still more, Self-Love.
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère,
Acknowledge me. I fit you like a glove.

[Walter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy is funny. His poems are witty and intelligent. They almost always utilize rhyme schemes. This book deals primarily with poems about death, blending humor with gravity.