Virgil, from The Aeneid

The commander’s words relieve their stricken hearts.
“My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now,
we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us
an end to this as well. You’ve threaded the rocks
resounding with Scylla’s howling rabid dogs,
and taken the brunt of the Cyclops’ boulders, too.
Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear.

A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.
Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns
our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out
a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree
the kingdom of Troy will rise gain. Bear up.
Save your strength for better times to come.”

From Robert Fagles’ 2006 translation of The Aeneid, which had been long awaited after his earlier work on The Iliad and The Odyssey. Fagles died last week; he was 74.

Last December, many of his peers and admirers gathered in New York for a celebration of his legacy.

(photo: Laura Pedrick/NYT)

1 April 2008 | poetry |

Alan Shapiro, “Clear”

and unavoidable, that’s how you have to see it,
Annie said, that’s what it all comes down to,
what the Buddha teaches: separation,
sooner or later, from parents, spouses, children
most of all, no matter what, so what else
is there to do except accept it, embrace it,
trying to say as if saying it
itself could be protection or escape,

as if the foresight weren’t the perfect foresight
between the knife cut and the cry, the siren
and the blue lights in the rearview; the clarity—
something that than that never-to-be-
prepared-for sudden moment when the friend
you’re running toward and calling to, and now
are touching on the shoulder to turn around,
has turned around and is no one you know.

From Old War. This new collection also includes “Skateboarder” (published in Blackbird) and “Suspension Bridge” (published in Slate, with a recording of Shapiro’s reading). Last weekend, LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin called Old War “the work of a poet who understands loss and longing but also knows enough not to be subsumed by them, to appreciate the small illuminations they allow.”

And be sure to read two earlier poems by Shapiro, “Sleet” and The Haunting,” at the Academy of American Poets website.

21 March 2008 | poetry |