Like most revelations

This brilliant collection of poems by one of America's most distinguished men of letters shows Richard Howard in a new phase: stronger, more resonant, more distinctive than ever. Two long, dramatic poems serve as the beginning and end of Like Most Revelations. In each, intimate perceptions are linked with the forces of the larger world: the world in which the speakers age, argue, founder, and face their fates. In between are twenty-seven poems ranging from monologue and epistle to elegy and satire. There are meditations on graffiti and Mozart, tributes to Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme, among others. Here too are poems of remembered identification and of dazed renunciation; poems of praise and poems of lamentation. Harold Bloom has called Richard Howard "the Robert Browning of our century," and certainly the monologues here have a power similar to Browning's. But they are also as immediate as today's newspaper. Superbly crafted and impressively varied, Like Most Revelations is Richard Howard's finest book of poems to date.