He is content to chisel and polish his lines, to let the natural light shine. As we cheer our poets on, perhaps what we want for ourselves here is something as conventional as wisdom. John Hall Wheelock and Wallace Stevens wrote their best work in their later years. Robert Rauschenberg and Willem De Kooning, arguably, achieved greatness as they grew older.

I think we secretly root for our artists and writers to become masters as they age. The images are clear, but night is falling in these lovely, simple lines. He’s pushing 80-years old (born 1923, New York City). In his newest collection, Darkening Water, Hoffman places us, and brilliantly, in his space and time immediately in the opening poem, “Summer”: Where is he now, at this stage of his career, this poet who in 1990, in the masterful “Who We Are,” guided us through contemporary life, by way of the Raven myth and Achilles, to conclude we “know nothing”? What has he discovered, the suicidal subject of “The Center of Attention” (one of the great American poems of the 1970s), who neither leaps nor hang-glides from the bridge, but simply climbs down and takes his place among the crowd? We are happy to put ourselves in his considerably gifted and accomplished hands-which is to say, few poets writing today possess the range and technical skill of Hoffman. Hoffman is looking for something in the night waters.

“Night Fishing” is a sexy poem about fishing, or is about sex and fishing, or, in the end, may be about sex alone. “We feed each other flesh with the sweet tang / Of the sea, and the fire, and salt, as the tide breathes,” Daniel Hoffman says in “Night Fishing” from New and Selected Poems 1948-1988, which originally appeared in Hang-Gliding from Helicon, one of 10 books of poems published in a distinguished career. Stony Brook, NY: Gravida Publications, 2002. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.īy Ruth Domino.

Loren eiseley poems