With some poets it is difficult not to apply knowledge of their personal history to the reading of their poems. In the case of the American poet Anthony Hecht one event seems so central to his work and his world view that it is impossible to ignore. On April 23^rd 1945, aged 22, Anthony Hecht was among those who liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp. What he saw there, and what he learnt later through extensive reading of Holocaust literature, stayed with him for his whole life and was a constant presence in his writing. Though not explicitly mentioned in his first collection, A Summoning of Stones, there is even here an elegiac tone filled with regret: “Susan, it had been once / My hope to see this place with you”.

However, Hecht is not an autobiographical poet and his personal experience at Flossenbürg itself is confronted directly only once, in the poem ‘Rites and Ceremonies’ from his second collection The Hard Hours. In this four-part poem Hecht places his own experience alongside other events from history, presenting a continuity which in no way diminishes the horror of the holocaust but allows the author to warn us against the complacency of viewing it as an aberrant one-off. A similar approach is used in the poem ‘Sacrifice’ where the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac is juxtaposed with the consequences of French family in World War II defying a German soldier’s demand for a bicycle

In the many poems in which Hecht returns to the Holocaust they present not his own experiences but those of others, both the survivors and the dead. It is Hecht’s gift for letting history speak through his poems that gives his work its deep humanity, even in the face of horror. Though he writes of loneliness, despair, violence and loss he does so with a nobility and grace that accords respect to those who have suffered. The elegance of his poetry creates art of the highest kind that is unmistakably aware of its duty to remember. Hecht is a poet who looks back; back to history, the Bible and poetic tradition. He does so with the sure knowledge that only by understanding what has gone before can an artist hope to produce work that is worthy of its forebears.

Every Hecht poem bears the stamp of a master craftsman and he is capable of breathtaking beauty, yet this lyricism is rarely allowed to stand unquestioned. In ‘Still Life’, the painterly title is followed by a mesmerising first stanza:

Sleep-walking vapour, like a visitant ghost,
Hovers above a lake
Of Tennysonian calm just before dawn.
Inverted trees and boulders waver and coast
In polished darkness. Glints of silver break
Among the liquid leafage, and then are gone.

This suspended moment of natural splendour continues for another three-and-half stanzas, before the poem prosaically reports: “I stand beneath a pine-tree in the cold, / Just before dawn, somewhere in Germany, / A cold, wet Garand rifle in my hands.” This combination of the elevated and the direct is has rarely been so well-executed as it is in Hecht, where it is something of a signature device. In two of his longest poems, ‘Venetian Vespers’ and ‘See Naples and Die’ the glories of Italy provide an ironic backdrop for the discontented narrators.

This selected edition presents poems from each of Hecht’s collections, from 1954’s A Summoning of Stones to his final book, 2001’s The Darkness and the Light, giving the reader a good overview of his stylistic development from his syntactically ornate beginnings to the stripped-back clarity of his late style. In the UK his work is not as well known as it should be, and his dark subject matter and high style have prevented him from becoming an anthology favourite. With an appendix of notes on the poems and a concise but detailed chronology of his life, this selection is the perfect introduction to Hecht’s work and will hopefully bring his poetry to a wider audience.

Bookmark to