Future Perfect

by Charles Martin

Published 6 June 2018

The latest dazzling collection of poems from Charles Martin, a modern poet working within the possibilities of traditional measures.

To be modern is to live not in a single era, but in a churn of new technologies, deep history, myth, literary traditions, and contemporary cultural memes. In Future Perfect, Charles Martin’s darkly comic new collection, the poet explores our time and the times that come before and after, which we inhabit and cultivate in memory and imagination. Through poems that play with form and challenge expectation, Martin examines the continuities that persist from time immemorial to the future perfect.

Sensitive to the traces left behind by the lives of his characters, Martin follows their tracks, reflections, echoes, and shadows. In “From Certain Footprints Found at Laetoli,” an ancient impression preserved in volcanic ash conjures up a family scene three million years past. In “The Last Resort of Mr. Kees” and “Mr. Kees Goes to a Party,” Martin adopts the persona of the vanished poet Weldon Kees to reimagine his disappearance. “Letter from Komarovo, 1962” retells the tense real-life meeting between Anna Akhmatova and Robert Frost a year before their nations almost destroyed one another. And in the titular sonnet sequence that ends the book, Martin conjures a childhood in the Bronx under the shadow of the mushroom cloud of nuclear war as the perfected future supplanting the present.

Introducing Buck Rogers to Randall Jarrell and combining new translations or reinterpretations of works by Ovid, G. G. Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.


Signs & Wonders

by Charles Martin

Published 30 May 2011
Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB); Wonders (as in "with furrowed brows"), a verb. The couplet that leads into Charles Martin's fifth collection of richly inventive poems suggests that the world is to be read into and wondered over. The signs in this new work from the prize-winning American poet of formal brilliance and darkly comic sensibility are as stark as the one on a cage at the zoo that says ENDANGERED SPECIES, as surprising as those that announce the return of irony, and as enigmatic as a single word carved on a tombstone. Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.

What The Darkness Proposes

by Charles Martin

Published 1 January 1997
"Martin is a moralist in the best sense of the word, a poet concerned with defining human values in a changing society, making his points with wit as well as compassion. He is not afraid of using ideas in verse and brings his intelligence as well as imagination to bear on each poem."--Dana Gioia In this new collection by poet and translator Charles Martin, a darkly comic vision engages an unpredictable variety of subjects in poems of astute technical assurance. In this book, the reader will find a displaced snapping turtle, advertisements that look back at us, the link between classical Athens and a television quiz show, and many other wonders, including the unsettling possibility of a poetry reading '"Whose audience consists of...you. There's only one of you, I see. One would have hoped there might be two. One ought to be outnumbered by One's audience, don't you agree? The two of us, then? You and I? Will no one else be dropping in? I thought as much. Then let's begin..." Praise for' Passages from Friday: "Martin's Friday...is a wholly successful characterization. His plain speech and plebeian misspellings, his notional capitals and italics compromise...a style that realizes and projects the speaker's character, a 'tour de force' in which style embodies vision.
"--Daniel Hoffman, in 'Words to Create a World' Praise for'The Poems of Catullus:' "[A] translation that successfully recreates in English the wit, the lyric exaltation, the playful banter, the despair, the scurrilous invective, and the dramatic flair of the original, all of it moving easily in artfully contrived and skillfully controlled English equivalents of Catullus' many and varied meters."--Bernard Knox, 'New York Review of Books' "Martin is an American poet; he puts the poetry, the immediacy of the street, back into English Catullus. The effect is electric."'--Newsweek'