Beautiful False Things: Poems

This tenth collection of Irving Feldman’s poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized as a body of work singular in its lyric, visionary, even prophetic intensity; its extravagant wit; its powerful storytelling; and its variety of voices and range of feeling - playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things, the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of Funny Bones duels with death in Florida; in Oedipus Host, Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky feminist heroine of Heavenly Muse visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, translation comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back.