Wonder and Wrath

by A. M. Juster

Overview

"Page after page, the poems strike home.”―Dana Gioia

Wonder and Wrath is the latest book of original and translated poetry from A. M. Juster, one of America’s most respected poets and translators. These poems display great formal accomplishment and deliver pleasure in the act of reading them—especially aloud. Rooted in the tradition, the poems in Wonder and Wrath have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Rattle and many other top journals. Read this book of poems from start to finish; you’ll enjoy every one of them!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781589881495
Publisher:	Dry, Paul Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	664,567
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

A. M. Juster is an award-winning poet, translator, and critic. His most recent books include John Milton's The Book of Elegies, The Elegies of Maximianus, and Sleaze & Slander, and his first book of original poetry, The Secret Language of Women, won the Richard Wilbur Award. Juster's poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The New Criterion and many other publications. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

"Three Visitors"


Mist on moonspill as midnight nears.

Adrift but not dreaming our drowsy son

is covered and kissed. At the kitchen door

our old basset is barking; coyotes out back

are standing like statues down by the dogwoods.

Across the crystal of crusted snow,

they search for stragglers to startle and chase.

Their vigil reveals no victims this night.


Trash would be trouble; they trot away

unbothered by bloodthroated growling and baying.

No star distracts their stealthy march.

As the highway hums they howl through the calm,

then savor new scents that savor their path

in this world awash in wonder and wrath.


"Japanese Maple in January”


All spring she brushed aside my arguments

it would be cheaper, and would make more sense,

to fill the yard with hardy native stock.

She bought her maple, junked the chain-link fence,

and tried to start a lawn; our crabby flock

of grackles grew too fat on seed to quarrel.

While masons tamed the mud with slate and rock,

She planted birches, hollies and a laurel.

New pickets kept our neighbors in their place.


October stripped her birches down to bone,

as if to warn the weak. Beside new stone

the pygmy flared with plum and amber lace.

As ice storms make old oaks bow, crack and groan,

her gift keeps shimmering with fragile grace.


“Untamed Daughter”


“. . . come, Kate, come, you must not look so sour.”

—The Taming of the Shrew


At fourteen she loves being critical

and tells me, “Shakespeare uses language well,

but could have been, like, more original…”

I sputter, but rebuttals fail to jell.

All those recycled plots make it appear

to her he was a sneaky plagiarist—

no better than that girl expelled last year—

so “they” should take him off her reading list.


Please, Caitlin, let it go; great writers borrow

like gamblers. Don’t begrudge the Bard a source

that he reshaped into Verona’s sorrow,

Miranda’s tenderness or Lear’s remorse,

but mark him down a point or two

because he tamed a Kate as fierce as you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 11

Outer

Heirloom 17

Animal Model 18

I Sit Half-Naked 19

Behold 20

Threat Levels 21

Epilogue 22

Farewell, Mr. Wizard 23

Cassandra 24

Falling for the Witch 25

Inertia 26

Surveillance 27

Vertigo 28

No Man's Island 30

Cuttyhunk, Late Afternoon 31

November Requiem 32

Three Visitors 33

The Devil in the Details 34

Autoimmune Attack 35

Rounding Up the Mimes 36

Inner

The impossible in which I believe 39

Kennings 40

An Apostle Falls 41

Japanese Maple in January 42

Visitation 43

Untamed Daughter 44

A Midsummer Night's Hangover 45

Fruit Flies 46

First Death 47

Sudden Onset 48

After Scattering David Berman's Ashes 49

Triptych: Dream, Convenience Store, Bar 50

Sundowning 51

No 52

A Kay Ryan Fanboy Poem 53

Rimbaud in Abyssinia 54

Proposed Clichés 55

Other

East African Proverbs 59

The Minx 60

To Her Husband for Beating Her 61

Completed Fragments of Rilke 62

Impossibilities 63

Riddles from Saint Aldhelm's Aenigmata 65

On the Death of a Most Honorable Man, Roger Manwood, Lord Chief Baron of the Queen's Exchequer 66

To My Dear Friend, M.J. Jackson, A Disparager of This Treatise 67

Escaping Myself 68

Autumn Night 69

Crowded Skies 70

Bob Dylan's Scandinavian Homesick Blues 72

Notes on the Translations 75

Editorial Reviews

10/19/2020

The meditative 10th book from poet and translator Juster closely considers contemporary life and mortality, as well as the whimsical and unexpected. These poems imagine the characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream hungover, fruit flies drunk on Riesling, and “A Kay Ryan Fanboy Poem,” but they also engage with the threat of tumors, and the difficulties of mourning the dead. Juster’s images are vivid and precise. In “I Sit Half-Naked,” the speaker contemplates depression—physical, economic, tropical—the title opening into a stark image: “with my socks still on, my gown half-open/ because this teaching hospital believes/ that dignity disrupts efficiency.” Juster’s poems are textured with rhyme and images that find correlatives between manmade threats and the natural world. In “Surveillance,” jays “return to eye/ our sparrows’ young... They dive and veer,/ and rise to rest/ on splintered pickets.” The section “Other” features a number of translations, including of East African proverbs from the Oromo language, and the French of Rimbaud. The eclectic variety of subjects is well matched by Juster’s range of styles and modes. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

The meditative tenth book from poet and translator Juster closely considers contemporary life and mortality, as well as the whimsical and unexpected. These poems imagine the characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream hungover, fruit flies drunk on Riesling, and 'A Kay Ryan Fanboy Poem,' but they also engage with the threat of tumors, and the difficulties of mourning the dead. Juster’s images are vivid and precise."―Publishers Weekly

“Juster is a poet of control—carefully pared lines whose concision creates profluent energy.”―The Millions

"Juster regards the common and the sacred in the everyday . . . Sections titled Outer, Inner, and Other form a cohesive triptych that anchors this strong collection, which includes Juster's skilled translations of poems by Li Po and Rimbaud, and a take on a Bob Dylan classic that is very funny and not to be missed."―Booklist

“Wonder and Wrath represents the culmination and integration of A. M. Juster's diverse and remarkable career. In nine previous volumes of poetry and verse translation, Juster displayed mastery of so many modes and manners that it was sometimes difficult to bring his artistic personality into focus. In Wonder and Wrath, the variety remains, but the superb new poems are compellingly unified. Juster's late style is capacious—nothing human is alien to him. He is simultaneously tender and savage, witty and sad, vulgar and learned. In this go-for-broke volume, Juster also writes in over two dozen forms from sonnet to pantoum, haiku to heroic couplet, all splendidly handled. Page after page, the poems strike home.”—Dana Gioia, author of 99 Poems: New & Selected

"For twenty years now, Juster has been a powerful and vital force for poetry. He has proven himself a master of formal poetics (if the form exists, he’s probably used it, and to stunning effect). As an exemplary translator, he has brought out of obscurity poems from the Chinese classics through the long Roman tradition, as well as works from Welsh and the African oral tradition, Aldheim, Milton’s Latin, Petrarch, Baudelaire, Rilke, and Housman. He’s a brilliant satirist as well, with delightful riffs on Billy Collins and Bob Dylan. As dark as many of these poems may be, their lyrical meters will move and comfort you, and surely make you laugh as only good poetry, like a good joke with a real punch, can."—Paul Mariani, author of Ordinary Time: Poems and The Mystery of It All

From the Publisher

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