Like his near-contemporary, the late Philip Larkin, Anthony Hecht has produced, since the ripening of his talent in the early Fifties, one slender volume of poems per decade: A Summoning of Stones (1954), The Hard Hours (1967), Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), and The Venetian Vespers (1979). (The Venetian Vespers turned out to be Hecht’s book for the Eighties.) All the work from these books has been gathered in a moderately sized Collected Earlier Poems—moderately sized, that is, for a poet who is now in his seventh decade. This book is accompanied by a separate collection of new work entitled The Transparent Man. Judging by the rate at which Hecht has been publishing, The Transparent Man is likely to be Hecht’s book for the Nineties.

Again like Larkin, Hecht is a meticulous writer, laboring arduously on his...

 
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