Table of Contents

  1. ONE: PLACES
  1. An espresso at the ‘Number Six’ (London 1956)
  2. The Fountain of Trevi
  3. Breakfast and jukebox on Piazza Trasimeno (Rome 1960)
  4. Cameras
  5. Robbers
  6. Morning at Chiavari (Liguria)
  7. Two views
  8. Genius (Lucerne)
  9. Col du Grand Saint Bernard
  10. Morning in Chamonix
  11. Colonel Pluchot chats with Madame Duchesne
  12. A child at the seaside
  13. On the beach
  14. Low tide and high tide in Normandy (Houlgate)
  15. Dawn at the manor of Cerisy-la-Salle
  16. One minute before noon
  17. The radical visits La Baule
  18. The clock in the Amsterdam flea market
  19. Flight 065
  20. From Chihuahua to the border
  21. Camp Gordon (Georgia 1953)
  22. Rainy season in barracks (Camp Fuji 1954)
  23. In a democracy
  24. Empty house
  25. The astronaut ate a piece of consecrated bread on the moon (1969)
  26. Let us dream (1)
  27. Let us dream (2)
  1. TWO: BUSY EROS
  1. Fever
  2. Falling
  3. Plenitude
  4. Young Pan hauls Methodists away
  5. Song
  6. The twenty-sixth of April
  7. Four hands whisper and do
  8. A banker sobbing on his typist
  9. My love answers my love
  10. After Herrick
  11. The garden
  12. No more poems
  13. The romantic materialist
  14. The jail
  15. The journey
  16. Lover’s maxim
  17. Unsafe I reply
  18. Thwarted lover
  19. Repine, repine
  20. Wounded philosopher
  21. The egg the Mother threw
  22. Others are more important
  23. Foul mood
  24. Brute English
  25. Sullen Myrmidons (1)
  26. Sullen Myrmidons (2)
  1. THREE: NAMES
  1. “The great lack of our time is that we have no commanding myth to which we can give allegiance”
  2. Immortality
  3. Empedocles
  4. War ditty (1)
  5. The life and death of Hannibal
  6. To Ovid, from army barracks
  7. Holy books
  8. On re-reading the New Testament
  9. The vision of Jesus of Nazareth concerning Johann Sebastian Bach
  10. The atheist
  11. A ditty sung by a choir of aging poets (among them Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe)
  12. Iago
  13. The infantryman and Baudelaire
  14. The conceptions of the intellect
  15. War ditty (2)
  16. Robert Frost: “I’d as soon make love in Lover’s Lane as write for Little Magazines”
  17. Meditation on Wallace Stevens’ “The imperfect is our paradise”
  18. Do not place your trust in babies
  19. Robinson Jeffers: “Come peace or war, the progress of Europe and America becomes a long process of deterioration”
  20. Words for John Strachey’s “On the Prevention of War”
  21. On the assassination of President Kennedy
  22. How did Sam Beckett die?
  23. “Late Frost” by Suzuhiko Kawasaki
  24. Bad choices
  1. FOUR: POEMS WITH ANIMALS
  1. Insect
  2. A fly a fly and I
  3. Motion
  4. I am a little snail
  5. After Li Po
  6. Garden idyll
  7. Crow
  8. Slanted bird
  9. Pigeon fly
  10. When does why end?
  11. Homeric simile
  12. Dead rats
  13. Impatience
  14. A visit to the zoo
  15. The young man who is blind
  1. FIVE: TENEBRAE
  1. The kidneys laugh at Plato
  2. Adriana in surgery
  3. Open letter to God
  4. The schoolyard
  5. Old man in love
  6. To Blaise Pascal
  7. Me for soft floors
  8. The tree
  9. Marching song
  10. Godless on Christmas day
  11. Forgive me
  12. The prisoner’s ballad
  13. Memorial Day
  14. One day, after lunch
  15. My father: 1978
  16. Dejection
  17. It
  1. SIX: TORPORS AND DIMINUTIONS
  1. Professor Oscar Mandel
  2. Man is what animal?
  3. The swimmer with the long cigar
  4. The lodger in the floating room
  5. The proofreader’s lament
  6. Easter Sunday in my 28th year
  7. On my 29th birthday
  8. The ecstasy of Brother Giles
  9. Poor Augustulus
  10. Song of boredom
  11. Always almost
  12. Triplets
  1. SEVEN: THE POET
  1. Where is the light?
  2. Sir Toby Belch against Shakespeare
  3. The poet grows old, in four movements
  4. The poet in a foul mood
  5. The poet in a heavenly mood
  6. The poet becomes an assistant professor
  7. A fellow poet is received at the White House
  8. Various poets
  9. The poet feeling small
  10. The poet wanting fame
  11. The poet neither Guibelline nor Guelf
  12. The poet gives up
  1. EIGHT: POEMS IN FRENCH
  1. Le fou rêve de l’amoureux
  2. Houlgate
  3. L’autobus à Paris (le 25 juin 2004)
  4. Oui, vous aimez la nature
  5. Si je pouvais
  6. Notre cathédrale
  7. Les morts ont peur
  8. Ce qui est arrivé
  9. La misère
  10. Sans titre