NEW! 2025 A rich collection of poems inspired by the Persian lyric tradition.
In The Khayyam Suite, acclaimed poet Charles Martin explores both the profound and the personal in verse that celebrates the spectrum of human experience.
At the heart of this collection is a study of the Rubaiyat, the renowned poem cycle attributed to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Martin pays homage to Khayyam's classical Persian poetic form—the ghazal—by infusing it with contemporary sensibilities, creating a rich tapestry of contemplation and artistry. By seamlessly blending Eastern and Western poetic traditions, Martin offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective on timeless questions that have captivated philosophers and poets throughout the ages. Each long poem consists of forty quatrains mirroring those of Khayyam's.
Martin's verses reflect on modern existential dilemmas, environmental crises, and the intricacies of personal relationships. From the haunting feeling of "On the Coming Extinctions" to the stark socioeconomic commentary in "On Capital," each poem invites the reader into a contemplative dialogue with the self. Martin's poems are both a mirror and a window to the soul, reflecting personal histories and illuminating the universal human condition. This collection, imbued with the lyrical charm and intellectual depth of Martin's writing, is a profound commentary on love, loss, and the fleeting nature of life.
The dazzling collection of poems from Charles Martin, a modern poet working within the possibilities of traditional measures.
To be modern is to live not in a single era, but in a churn of new technologies, deep history, myth, literary traditions, and contemporary cultural memes. In Future Perfect, Charles Martin’s darkly comic new collection, the poet explores our time and the times that come before and after, which we inhabit and cultivate in memory and imagination. Through poems that play with form and challenge expectation, Martin examines the continuities that persist from time immemorial to the future perfect.
Sensitive to the traces left behind by the lives of his characters, Martin follows their tracks, reflections, echoes, and shadows. In “From Certain Footprints Found at Laetoli,” an ancient impression preserved in volcanic ash conjures up a family scene three million years past. In “The Last Resort of Mr. Kees” and “Mr. Kees Goes to a Party,” Martin adopts the persona of the vanished poet Weldon Kees to reimagine his disappearance. “Letter from Komarovo, 1962” retells the tense real-life meeting between Anna Akhmatova and Robert Frost a year before their nations almost destroyed one another. And in the titular sonnet sequence that ends the book, Martin conjures a childhood in the Bronx under the shadow of the mushroom cloud of nuclear war as the perfected future supplanting the present.
Introducing Buck Rogers to Randall Jarrell and combining new translations or reinterpretations of works by Ovid, G. G. Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.
Winner of the CNY Book Award in Poetry of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse
Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB);
Wonders (as in "with furrowed brows"), a verb.
The couplet that leads into Charles Martin's fifth collection of richly inventive poems suggests that the world is to be read into and wondered over. The signs in this new work from the prize-winning American poet of formal brilliance and darkly comic sensibility are as stark as the one on a cage at the zoo that says ENDANGERED SPECIES, as surprising as those that announce the return of irony, and as enigmatic as a single word carved on a tombstone. Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.
As Signs & Wonders demonstrates so triumphantly, you'd have a hard time to find better contemporary poems than Charles Martin's. I can only be grateful for 'Ovid to His Book,' 'Support,' 'Poem for the Millennium,' 'Near Jeffrey's Hook,' 'After 9/11,' 'Poison,' and many more. Martin does not merely write well-made, shapely poems; he charges them with energy. I'm placing my bet that they will last. ―X. J. Kennedy
A poet of formal brilliance and a darkly comic sensibility, two-time Pulitzer Prize- nominee Charles Martin has, over three decades of creativity, produced a most unusual collection of poems; the forms are traditional but the concerns are as contemporary as TV's Jeopardy, lingerie from Victoria's Secret, or leftover ICBMs. "Deft, witty, intelligent and richly colloquial, this is poetry of technical mastery and an easy freedom based on well-earned assurance," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Anthony Hecht. Renowned for his translations of Catullus and Ovid, Martin's subjects are delightfully unpredictable: John Coltrane rubs shoulders with Petronius; a family of loquacious mice philosophizes about mortality; and Robinson Crusoe's Friday and Lot's wife both have their say. Mourned are the "disappeared" of Guatemala, as well as a beloved uncle whose brutal murder lay shrouded in the family's silence. From New York's Bowery to an artists' colony in California to the landscape of Vermont, Martin finds "the legends of the heart's lust for joy and violence.
It was with that wonderful poem Passages from Friday that I got to know Charles Martin’ poetry well, and my admiration for their tough-minded moral substance has continued to grow. The new poems in this volume have a new sort of power. It is not only that Martin’s wit, his exquisite and original modulation of formal cadences and his classical learning make his epigrams the finest of those by a living writer, but that in his larger concerns for the particulars of representation and reality he remains age and serious whether being pointed or meditative. This is a strong and lovely book. —John Hollander
"Martin is a moralist in the best sense of the word, a poet concerned with defining human values in a changing society, making his points with wit as well as compassion. He is not afraid of using ideas in verse and brings his intelligence as well as imagination to bear on each poem." --Dana Gioia
In this new collection by poet and translator Charles Martin, a darkly comic vision engages an unpredictable variety of subjects in poems of astute technical assurance. In this book, the reader will find a displaced snapping turtle, advertisements that look back at us, the link between classical Athens and a television quiz show, and many other wonders, including the unsettling possibility of a poetry reading “Whose audience consists of... you. There's only one of you, I see. One would have hoped there might be two. One ought to be outnumbered by One's audience, don't you agree? The two of us, then? You and I? Will no one else be dropping in? I thought as much. Then let's begin... "
Like bright graffiti in a schoolyard, Charles Martin's poems "renew the ancient complaint/ of speech against stone". Serious and playful-- often at the same time-- they give form to the part of us that resists blank walls. "Steal the Bacon" shows Martin at his inventive best, drawing figures in language. That language ranges from prehistoric scrimshaw to the word on the sign at the end of the world. At Crusoe's command, Friday narrates a long poem in eighteenth-century diction, giving "a true Account of our Life together/ in all Particulars"; another man teaches English to recent immigrants in a new land that they will discover "exists only in what we say about it". Poems eavesdrop on various nesting places in which domesticity translates the language of desire, or explore the silences of a landscape without history, perhaps without a future. But throughout "Steal the Bacon", voices affirm the present, even if they can affirm nothing else. The word on the sign at the end of the world is "Yes".
Martin's rhymed sonnets and narratives, his willingness to make statements, his social consciousness, his refusal to write occasional verse, mark him as one of the finest younger poets of our time. — Dick Allen, The Hudson Review
Passages from Friday
260 numbered copies printed under the direction of Harry Duncan on Nideggen paper in Perpetua type. Bound in cloth over boards.
Martin's Friday is a wholly successful characterization. His plain speech and plebeian misspellings, his notional capitals and italics compromise... a style that realizes and projects the speaker's character, a tour de force in which style embodies vision.
--Daniel Hoffman, in Words to Create a World
“Where there is room for error,” Charles Martin writes, meditating not on the past which has been forged by the articulation of the bones of dinosaurs at the Brooklyn Museum, “there is room for us.” It is very much the theme of these poems and the ruined, ruinous, funny and terrifying world they conjure.
—Robert Hass, Ploughshares