Dante in China [Hardcover]

In John Barr's poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world. Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful. Bachs final fugue informs all of nature. Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan. Aristotle finds Demagogues are the insects of politics. / Like water beetles they stay afloat / on surface tension, they taxi on iridescence. And his afterlife: When three-headed Cerberus greeted him / Socrates replied: I wont need / an attack dog, thankyou. I married one.John Barr has a naturalists flair for identifying and naming the more curious phenomena and events of experience. He is a master builder.Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning3 Sections

W. H. Auden once longed for the return of a civic poetry, by which he meant two things: a poetry whose subjects would be interesting to people who had no primary investment in the art, and a poetry that managed to entertain and instruct at the same time. How happy Auden might have been with this inventive, various, and large-spirited book by John Barr! I hope it finds the wide audience it certainly deserves.Christian Wiman, author ofOnce in the West, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award

The books powerfully imagined final poem, Aristotles Will, is like nothing in our poetry. It is both historical and fictionalcomic, hilarious, deeply ironic, and at the same time earnest, heartbreaking, instructive. It is about fathers and sons, teachers and students, arrogance, ignorance, lessons learned, lessons wasted, the indecency of power, the passion, the compassion, the loss. It is a wonderful work.Ilya Kaminsky, co-editor ofThe Ecco Anthology of International Poetry

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