A SMATTERING OF REVIEWS & RESPONSES
One of America’s best poets and translators, comparable to Auden in his humanity, intellectual vitality and formal range. Future Perfect launches from the lives of others and from the poet’s own autobiography. It soars and brings us trenchantly down to earth. A performance of perfection. —David Mason
There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” With Future Perfect, Martin speaks to the implications of this fear, by now sustained for over seventy years since Hiroshima.
His personal voice is urbane, sophisticated, Ovidian one might almost say—not the Ovid of the erotic verse, at least on the evidence of his latest collection, but of the exile poems and the Metamorphoses, of which Martin has in fact published a translation. Martin is a virtuoso of end-rhyme, a deft wielder of iambic pentameter (which he has called “the ever dependable, the ever renewable workhorse of English poetry”), and a dab hand at fixed forms like the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina, all of which are represented in Future Perfect. One of a series of five poems that focus on the life of Weldon Kees is even in blank verse, while a poem about narcissism (and Narcissus) is a kind of interlaced double villanelle in which the two forms represent the self and the self’s reflection.
—Bruce Whiteman, The Hudson Review
In poem after poem, eloquently parsing our species’ rich and fearful heritage, Charles Martin’s urbanity both brightens and heightens the gloom of his searchingly ironic vision. Future Perfect is a wise and multilayered book to savor, ponder, and return to. —Rachel Hadas
Charles Martin's new book, Signs & Wonders, is elegant and powerful. Past and present commingle as he writes poems of contemporary life in traditional form, and with a remarkable range: 'Poem for the Millennium' in accentual verse, and one of the best 9/11 poems we have in terza rima. Taking his cue from Catullus and Ovid, whose work he has brilliantly translated, Martin creates his own new vision of the world in language of praise with an underlying tone of combined horror and awe. ―Grace Schulman
“If you need to be reminded, or to discover, why Martin is considered a master,
pick up your own copy of Signs & Wonders.”
―Alexander Pepple, Think Journal
“After 9/11” is alone worth the price of the book and will repay many readings, but all the poems share important virtues. They’re sonically pleasing and rich in allusion, but they’re also direct. Here there are no cryptic, difficult poems on the attack. Nothing here is pointless, and much is beautiful. All works toward a fruitful clarity and invites us to think hard about what bones we and Martin have built on.
WINNER of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
of the Academy of American Poets
Only a gifted metrist could perform the legerdemain that Martin easily accomplishes, as when he describes how the music of Orpheus enchanted trees and beasts, "and made the very stones skip in his wake." Charles Martin's new translation of the Metamorphoses, the latest in a 500-year-old tradition, both gives us an Ovid for our times and reminds us that in our times Ovid is everywhere.
–Mark Jarman, The Hudson Review
Martin is an American poet;
he puts the poetry, the immediacy of the street, back into English Catullus.
The effect is electric.
—Peter S. Prescott, NEWSWEEK
Successfully recreates in English the wit, the lyric exaltation, the playful banter, the despair, the scurrilous invective, and the dramatic flair of the original, all of it moving easily in artfully contrived and skillfully controlled English equivalents of Catullus' many and varied meters.
—Bernard Knox
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Martin has done us a great service in giving us the best recent, readable, functional translations
of the works of our great-great-grandfather. —Hayden Carruth, The Hudson Review
R.S. Gwynn in The Hudson Review
Charles Martin, whose Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems gathers work from three earlier collections, has distinguished himself as a translator of Catullus and combines a deft formalism with an inquisitive subject matter that ranges from Defoe to the contemporary marketing of lingerie. I first read Martin in a quarterly some years ago when I came across his remarkable "Passages from Friday," a longish poem (twenty-four pages in seventeen sections) that ought to be required reading in any postcolonial literature course. . .
Of the goodly section of new work, I would single out the narrative "How My Queer Uncle Came to Die at Last," a poem that first appeared in these pages. The poet's Uncle Fred served as the "Soft, sybaritic emissary / Of Dionysus to the Bronx," bringing to family gatherings and to the teenaged poet inklings of a larger world full "Of what were called 'the finer things.'" The poem is part mystery story, with the poet's mother eventually revealing that the uncle's death, which was publicly attributed to a heart attack, actually resulted from a brutal beating in public men's room. This knowledge sparks the poet's initiation into world of deeper compassion and understanding.
A true translation whose literary qualities make it stand out from the rest.
—Daniel Gold, Cornell University
Gavin Flood and Charles Martin have taken on the immense challenge of translating The Bhagavad Gita, a highly structured classical Indian poem and sacred text, into contemporary, accessible English, and have succeeded beautifully, creating an intriguing narrative poem whose structure reflects the complexities and rhythms of the original.
—Edith Grossman
I used to teach the Gita in world literature courses and found it usefully perplexing to my students. In those days we read the Barbara Stoler Miller translation, which still strikes me as being very good. This new translation by Gavin Flood, a scholar of Hinduism, and Charles Martin, a wonderful poet and translator, progresses in more elegant measures and has much else to recommend it, including its excellent notes. It should set a new standard for educators. —David Mason in The Hudson Review
At a time when classic forms and motifs have become academic curios for hordes of freestyle poetry gymnasts, Martin sharply revives the relevance of old forms. Well-honed, and full-blooded, there is room at the top for Room For Error.
—-Colette Inez in Parnassas Poetry in Review