William Daryl Hine was a poet and translator.
After a ten-year stint as editor of Poetry and ten volumes of exquisitely wrought poems, Canadian Daryl Hine has yet to achieve the accolades from readers that he has from poets. His Academic Festival Overtures , a 187-page (!) Alexandrine poem, recounts the rites of spring, summer, and passage through his 14th year, his first in a British Columbian junior high school. He must cope with the recent death of his beloved mother, a lonely life with a stern father, his homosexuality and first (unconsummated) love for a ``straight'' age-mate who is paralyzed in a bicycle accident. Precocious and priggish, Hine's narrator/persona treats the reader to literary allusions, bons mots, excellent characterizations, awful sexual puns, and clever enjambementsin short, a sustained, autobiographical tour of the poet's youthful libido. J.P. Lewis, Integrative Studies Dept., Otterbein Coll., Westerville, Ohio
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