Trappings

A delightfully witty and erudite book of new poems from this highly respected American poet, this is Richard Howard's eleventh collection of poetry and is described by his American publisher as being the wisest of his books, a continuous profusion of inquiries, dissents, high spirits.

In these poems, we glimpse, through the lens of celebrated pictures over the centuries (especially portraits) the imagined truth behind their creation, and the lives of their creators, juxtaposed with the poet's exquisitely executed portraits of his own contemporaries. These poems are full of humour, by turns wry and ironic, underlaid by a deep humanity, understanding and above all, wisdom.

Richard Howard is one of the USA's most highly-regarded poets. In 1970 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poems, Untitled Subjects, and received the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award for his books on poetry. In 1996, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is poetry editor of the Paris Review and Western Humanities Review, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and Professor of Practice in the School of Arts(Writing Division) of Columbia University. He is also widely known as a translator from the French, and has published over 150 translations, including works by Cioran, Stendhal, Roland Barthes and Baudelaire, for the translation of whose Fleurs du mal he received the American Book Award in 1983.

Paperback
82 pages
ISBN 1 900072 34 3
Published January 2002

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