In 1979, Five American Poets helped to change our sense of American poetry, introducing the work of Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck and Robert Pinsky to British readers and writers. Now, in a much-changed landscape, this volume revisits that constellation of writers: what have they been up to since the 1970s; why have they become so important in energising the writing of their own country; what do they bring to us?

They shared at Stanford University in California an apprenticeship in language as students of the poet-critic Yvor Winters. Associates since the 1960s, they never constituted a ‘movement’, but they have in common, in Clive Wilmer’s words, ‘a fundamental faith, tested to endurance by the politics of our era, that a common language implies a common society’. Five American Poets continues a conversation between these distinctive voices, from the colloquial ease of Robert Pinsky to the allusive discontinuities of John Matthias, from James McMichael’s narratives to the meditative textures created by John Peck and the sensuous immediacy of Robert Hass.

Cover painting: Robert Hooper, Acme. Oil on canvas, 32in. x 27in. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Cover design StephenRaw.com

Contents

Foreword by Michael Schmidt xi
Introduction by Clive Wilmer xv

ROBERT HASS
Heroic Simile
Meditation at Lagunitas
The Yellow Bicycle
The Origin of Cities
The Beginning of September
Privilege of Being
Churchyard
Conversion
Human Wishes
The Apple Trees at Olema
Misery and Splendor
Cuttings
Body Through Which the Dream Flows
The Lovers Undressing
Sad
Migration
Dark
Things Change
Stories in Bed
Monday Morning, Late Summer
So
Plus Which
Santa Barbara Road
Like Three Fair Branches from One Root Deriv’d
Transparent Garments
Faint Music
Then Time
That Music
A Story about the Body
Spring Drawing
Late Spring
Rusia en 1931
Spring Drawing 2
Time and Materials
The Seventh Night
Afterword

JOHN MATTHIAS
Post-Anecdotal
After Years Away
I My Bed, My Father’s Bell
II My Father’s Bell, My Grandfather’s Books
III My Mother’s Broom, My Father’s Bell
Rhododendron
Everything To Be Endured
Not Having Read
Francophiles, 1958
Smultronstället
My Mother’s Webster
Diminished Third
I Expectation
II Doctor Faust
III The Golden Calf
A Note on Barber’s Adagio
Four Seasons of Vladimir Dukelsky
I Winter
II Spring
III Summer
IV Autumn
Two in New York
I Easter 1912
II Christmas 1929
Two in Harar
I Sir Richard Burton, 1854
II Arthur Rimbaud, 1886-1888
She Maps Iraq
Persistent Elegy
Walter’s House
Tsunami: The Animals
Swell
Afterword

JAMES McMICHAEL
Pretty Blue Apron
from Each in a Place Apart
from Four Good Things
The British Countryside in Pictures
Above the Red Deep-Water Clays
Posited
Back
The Believed In
Afterword

JOHN PECK
Viaticum
Letting Up
Hazelnut
Wind under Sash, Val Ferret
Leaving the Central Station
Interleaved Lines on Jephthah and his Daughter
Times Passing the Breakwater
“He who called blood builder...”
Zürich, the Stork Inn
End of July
Riposte
White Deer Running
Archaeus Terrae
Reichenau Afternoon
Woods Burial
Getting at What Happens
Romanza
Incident near Vicenza
Trio Threaded on Lines from the Parthian Hymns
“Giovanni...”
Barn Doorway in July
Unfinished Announcement
Passage
Violin
Book of the Dead? We Have no Book of the Dead
Random-bench
Dawn Renga
Afterword

ROBERT PINSKY
Book
Antique
The Thicket
Veni, Creator Spiritus
In Defense of Allusion
Eurydice and Stalin
The Forgetting
Poem of Disconnected Parts
Samurai Song
Ode to Meaning
To Television
The Green Piano
Jersey Rain
Ginza Samba
Poem with Refrains
House Hour
From the Childhood of Jesus
The Hearts
The Want Bone
An Old Man
Shirt
At Pleasure Bay
ABC
XYZ
Memorial
The Figured Wheel
From the Last Canto of Paradise
Afterword

Select Bibliography
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Acknowledgements