Collected Earlier Poems of Anthony Hecht: The Complete Texts of The Hard Hours, Millions of Strange Shadows, and The Venetian Vespers [Paperback]

 THE VENETIAN VESPERS (1979)
“In its clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness, Anthony Hecht’s poetry goes from strength to strength.  The Venetian Vespers is at once an intense corroboration and an ample extension of his subtle, supple talents.  Nothing humane is alien to him…  There is a handful of short poems that are fostered alike by beauty and fear.  But it is the four long poems that confirm Hecht as a poet of the widest apprehensions and comprehension, and this without the gigantism that so haunts American poetic ambition.”
 —Christopher Ricks, The New York Times Book Review
 
MILLIONS OF STRANGE SHADOWS (1977)
“The high artistry of Anthony Hecht has been to nurture his own gift, and to work at it with the deliberateness and steadiness that it deserved from him... Emotional intensity and formal power were combined in Hecht from his beginnings… The thirty poems in Millions of Strange Shadows are all fully written, but several truly are the best he has published and are very likely to endure.  The very best is ‘Green: An Epistle,’ which is a lesson in profound, controlled subjectivity and self-revelation, an exact antithesis to the opaque squalors of ‘confessional’ poets.  Almost equally remarkable is ‘Coming Home,’ in which the poet John Clare receives a deeper interpretation than any critic has afforded him…”                              &#160lÓÏ