As Signs & Wonders demonstrates so triumphantly, you'd have a hard time to find better contemporary poems than Charles Martin's. I can only be grateful for 'Ovid to His Book,' 'Support,' 'Poem for the Millennium,' 'Near Jeffrey's Hook,' 'After 9/11,' 'Poison,' and many more. Martin does not merely write well-made, shapely poems; he charges them with energy. I'm placing my bet that they will last. -- X. J. Kennedy Charles Martin's new book, Signs & Wonders, is elegant and powerful. Past and present commingle as he writes poems of contemporary life in traditional form, and with a remarkable range: 'Poem for the Millennium' in accentual verse, and one of the best 9/11 poems we have in terza rima. Taking his cue from Catullus and Ovid, whose work he has brilliantly translated, Martin creates his own new vision of the world in language of praise with an underlying tone of combined horror and awe. -- Grace Schulman Like an expert cellist in full control of phrasing and intonation, he can make a line of metrical verse sonorous or playful, tenebrous or scintillating, elegiac or mercurial. -- David Yezzi Charles Martin is a poet of dazzling formal dexterity. Deep realizations flow through his fluent lines and stanzas, in which our present condition is clarified by allusions to our past. A poem on a computer virus at the Millennium invokes earlier monstrous invasions in the alliterative meter of Beowulf, the horror of 9/11 is summoned by tercets as in The Inferno. The clarity, the precision of Martin's language makes his poems accessible and memorable. This is the work of a master. -- Daniel Hoffman
Directions for Assembly
I. The Life in Letters
The Flower Thief
Souvenir
Some Kind of Happiness
The Sacred Monsters
Words to Utter at Nightfall
Mind in the Trees
Autopsychography
Support
East Side, West Side
1. Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid
2. John Koch at the New-York Historical Society: The Party
To Himself
Brooklyn in the Seventies
This Organizing Solitude
This Organizing Solitude
Theory Victorious
II. Some Romans
On a Roman Perfume Bottle
Ava Pacis
Ovid to His Book
Three Sonnets from the Romanesco of G.G. Belli
1. The Good Soldiers
2. The Spaniard
3. The Coffee House Philosopher
III. Near Jeffrey's Hook
The Twentieth Century in Photographs
Poem for the Millennium
Who Knows What's Best?
Getting Carded
For the End of the Age of Irony
Near Jeffrey's Hook
Foreboding
After 9/11
After Wang Wei
Poison
Acknowledgments
Two of Charles Martin's earlier collections of poetry, What the Darkness Proposes and Steal the Bacon, were published by Johns Hopkins, as was his translation, The Poems of Catullus. In 2005 he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
'After 9/11' is alone worth the price of the book and will repay many readings, but all the poems share important virtues. They're sonically pleasing and rich in allusion, but they're also direct. Here there are no cryptic, difficult poems on the attack. Nothing here is pointless, and much is beautiful. All works toward a fruitful clarity and invites us to think hard about what bones we and Martin have built on. -- Maryann Corbett Contemporary Poetry Review If you need to be reminded, or to discover, why Martin is considered a master, pick up your own copy of Signs & Wonders. -- Alexander Pepple Think Journal
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