Daryl Hine 1936-2012

Here is the email I received from Evan Jones last night.

Daryl Hine passed away yesterday [April 20] in Evanston around 9:30pm. His health wasn't great, but he was stable. We spoke two weeks ago. He was at work on his own version of the Argonautica—from the ship's point of view. He had just bought a new MacBook. Daryl, Jay Macpherson and Virgil Burnett in one year. That's the end of something.

Some excellent essays on Hines' work and career are available online. Here's one by Eric Ormsby, and another by Bill Coyle. Arc serves up only a morsel of James Pollock's piece (but you can dine on the whole thing in Pollock's upcoming collection of essays, out in November).

Poetry as Page Turner

It's not quite a triumphal march, but after nearly a year of hiding in plain sight, Bruce Taylor's selected No End in Strangeness is finally getting some attention. Over at Maisonneuve, David Godkin and Mathew Henderson are both excited by the discovery:

"Above everything, it’s the ease of these poems and Taylor’s style overall that makes him so readable in my view, accomplishing something I wouldn’t have thought possible in the turgidity that makes up so much modern poetry, i.e. poetry as page turner. No End in Strangeness is a book that hits far more often than it misses. A real pleasure to read and easily recommended."

And in a long review for Contemporary Poetry Review, Bill Coyle is similarly wowed:

"[Taylor's poems] combine clarity, subtlety and musicality in a way that leave most of the poet’s contemporaries (he was born in 1960) standing still. A book about entropy and failure, No End in Strangeness is a resounding success."

The Case For Daryl Hine

Bill Coyle makes it ("one of the most gifted poets alive")—but not without caveats:

Too many times, I have had the experience of recommending Hine’s work to readers essentially in tune with his esthetic, only to have them report back that they find him remote, cold, mandarin to the point of unreadability. In distinguishing between those poems of his that contain an embarrassment of riches and those that are so rich as to be indigestible, then, I’m not so much trying to establish a Hine canon as assure new readers that such distinctions can profitably be made.

Read the rest of Coyle's excellent essay here.