Azores — (2008)

Poems

By David Yezzi

“The sophistication of Mr. Yezzi’s language perfectly suits the sophistication of his understanding, and some of the poems in Azores—“Very Like a Whale,” “Dog’s Life,” the brilliant and unexpected dramatic monologue “The Ghost-Seer”—display a mastery reminiscent of Philip Larkin and Donald Justice, which no poet of Mr. Yezzi’s generation can match.”

The New York Sun

“Yezzi’s vocabulary and diction are entirely contemporary; his meters and forms are traditional.... Altogether, for versatility and craft, he’s a new, necessarily less jingly Longfellow.”

Booklist

“David Yezzi’s finely-tuned meters make the sound of New York now: a generous, disabused intelligence holding its nerve as nonsense and brutality build at the line’s edge, and the consolations of the personal burn brighter as darkness grows. A terrific book.”

Glyn Maxwell

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Like a voyage to the Portuguese islands of the title, the poems in Azores arrive at their striking and hard-won destinations over the often-treacherous waters of experience—a man mourns the fact that he cannot not mourn, a father warns his daughter about harsh contingency, an unnamed visitor violently disrupts a quiet domestic scene. The ever-present and uncomfortable realities of envy, lust, and mortality haunt the book from poem to poem. Yezzi does not shy away from frank assessments of desire and human failing, the persistent difficulties of which are relieved periodically by a cautious optimism and even joy. Whether the poem’s backdrop is volcanic islands in the Mid-Atlantic or Manhattan Island at sunset, Yezzi examines the forces of change in the natural world, as w hether mundane or startlingly intimate. By turns plainspoken, caustic, evocative, and wry, these poems are, in matters of form, well-wrought and musical and, in matters of the heart, clear-eyed and always richly human.

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David Yezzi’s books of poetry are Sad Is Eros and The Hidden Model. His libretto for a chamber opera by David Conte, Firebird Motel, received its world premiere in 2003 and was released on CD by Arsis in 2007. His poems and criticism have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2006, and elsewhere. He is executive editor of the New Criterion.