The Arrow-Maker

In The Arrow-maker, D.M. Black’s sensitive attention to emotional states of mind, sometimes his own, sometimes those of others such as St. Augustine, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan or Jacques Brel, also extends to more public themes of war and climate change. As always, his forms are various, but there is a predominance now of poems spoken in a thinking voice that remembers the iambic pentameter without being subdued by it. In a final section, versions of two Dante cantos, from the Purgatorio and Paradiso, focus in particular on Dante’s qualities of thoughtfulness and intellectual precision.