Collected Earlier Poems: The Complete Texts of the Hard Hours, Millions of Strange Shadows, the Venetian Vespers

by Anthony Hecht

Poems deal with the breakup of a marriage, music, animals, myths, nature, aging and travel

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published July 7, 1990

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read More Light, More Light, another poem that influenced Donald Ray Pollock. All I can say is short and depressing.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've actually read only Hard Hours and Venetian Vespers butthey are not listed on Goodreads as individual titles. I love Hecht. His precision, elegance, control are all reasons I go to him when I've read too many bad poems by people who really seem to have no aptitude for writing poetry.

[Alok Ghimire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waited until I finished The Venetian Vespers to write about this entire collection. Since the time I first read Hecht (about six months ago) his verse has become the kind of concentrated comfort to which I return in order to experience an elegant repose.
Two things occur when you read a great poet's good collection. First, you marvel at the easy world of sounds, its endless permutations holding up a world more real and ephemeral than a world tirelessly sustained through excellent (but nevertheless on a different plane) prose. Second, you are quite certain that this particular poet has now exhausted the patterns capable of being produced in formal English. Each great poet momentarily kills the future of his language.
And yet, the patterns reappear. Some other ear listens to the sound of the same pebble, but only after the second ripple has drowned the sharper sound of the first dip.

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of my favorite poems from high school/early college. Pretty grim stuff. I don't know anything about poetry, but Hecht seems to have such control over the meter and structure of his poems. Really fascinating.

[ASC Library]

811.54 Hec

[Cameron Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peerless, if you ask me. Hecht's standards of form, diction, and syntax completely outclass most of the stuff that passes for poetry today--yet without the air of snobbery one might expect of a staunch 20th-century formalist. *cue anxiety of influence*

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with the later poems, a treasure of craft, talent, dedication and imagination that makes you see how the tradition can always be renewed and practiced in the present.