Richard Eberhart (1904–2005)

Richard Eberhart is my favorite contemporary poet, and this collection of all his published poems over a fifty-six year period is worth the read. There are a few weak poems, but they are limited to Eberhart's later career, and he later made up for them in his splendid volume, Maine Poems. Eberhart believed in the old Greek idea of the "divine madness" of the poet, and that what arose from the creative impulse did not require revision--thus much of his poetry is his original draft of the work. His poetry deals with universal themes--nature, God, childhood, growing up, and death--and though it skirts the border of over-abstraction, his poems manage, for the most part, to maintain their connection to the concrete world of experience. The anthology includes Eberhart's justly famous 1934 poem, "The Groundhog," and his 1944 poem, "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment." My personal favorite, concerning the loss of childhood, is "If I Could Only Live at the Pitch that is Near Madness." In this poem, childhood is "violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility," yet that stage is transcended when adulthood intervenes, when "....a realm of complexity came / Where nothing is possible but necessity / And the truth waiting there like a red babe."
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