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Dwelling Places

Poems and Translations

Hailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place.

"David Ferry’s Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry’s characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and ’inner’ translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."—Frank Bidart

"Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."—Boston Review

Read an excerpt.


69 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 1993

Phoenix Poets

Poetry

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Strabo Reading Megasthenes
Dives
The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People
Committee
Civilization and Its Discontents
The Blind People
The Proselyte
A Young Woman
Goodnight
Nocturnal
Abyss
Name
Of Rhyme
Epigram
Autumn
Garden Dog
Horses
Unos Caballos
Roof
At the Hospital
A Morning Song
Of Violets
Levis Exsurgit Zephirus
Herbsttag
The Lesson
In the Garden
Roman Elegy VIII
When We Were Children
Mnemosyne
Harvesters Resting
Mary in Old Age
Prayer to the Gods of the Night
Envoi
Notes

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