THE DARKNESS AND THE LIGHT

A fiercely melancholic sequence of lyrics, odes, monologues, and translations, many of them written with the Biblical tales in mind. The severe rhythms and wild rhymes (“guano” is made to chime with “soprano”) make wonderfully baroque patterns—Bach partitas set stylishly to words. But music is only part of the festivities offered in Hecht’s work. His poems are also painterly, full of still lives, landscapes, and jewel-box miniatures. Lot’s wife remembers the “exquisite satisfactions” of her childhood in this way: “The iridescent labyrinth of the spider, / Its tethered tensor nest of polygons / puffed by the breeze to a little bellying sail— / Merely observing this gave infinite pleasure.” Hecht often figures the poet as a witness, and the infinite pleasures of observation are always mixed with more difficult moral concerns like passivity, historical atrocity, and individual despair. In “A Witness,” a “briny, tough, and thorned sea holly” watches as “The ocean rams itself in pitched assault / And spastic rage to which there is no halt . . . / At scenes of sacrifice, unrelieved pain, / figured in froth, aquamarine and black.” That pain should go unrelieved is Hecht’s way of acknowledging poetry’s limits and history’s wounds; the tough holly is his protest against both. Another tactic for combating forgetfulness is to resurrect a voice. Hecht’s most well known poem of this type is “The Maid of Dover” (after Arnold), and in the new collection he approaches those heights with the savage “Judith”: “It was easy. Holofernes was pretty tight; / I had only to show some cleavage and he was done for.”

No contemporary poet is so lapidary as Hecht. That he can put such beauty at the service of a stringent ethic is his continual gift.