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The Reemergence of a Modern Master

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Elsewhere, Herbert regrets the circuitousness of metaphor -- its necessary indirections and digressions. But metaphor, he also admits, is one of the ways that we make the world intelligible by relating it to what we already know. It is a mirror that reflects our own desires, losses and frailties:

and just to say -- I love

I run around like mad

picking up handfuls of birds

and my tenderness

which after all is not made of water

asks the water for a face

The new Collected Poems leaves no doubt about the place of Herbert's work in 20th-century letters, which rivals that of W. H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop in its originality, imaginative breadth and humane vigilance. *

Anthony Cuda is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His reviews of poetry appear regularly in the New Criterion and Field.

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