Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments Hardcover - 2008

From the rear cover

"The brilliance of Reginald Gibbons's translations of Sophocles lies in an empathetic leap of imagination that has allowed him to situate these ancient poems at an intersection where the passion of outcries, songs, and declamations encounters the elegance of the written word."--Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan

"Reginald Gibbons gives us Sophocles' poetry sprung free from plot and dramatic action. Elemental, swift, kaleidoscopic, the odes and fragments are forcefully present in Gibbons's spare style, and they can take one's breath away. Here is a distillate of Sophocles, strangely new and strangely familiar."--Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems

"For years now, Reginald Gibbons has been writing some of the best poetry in America, and at the same time he has distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant and accomplished translators of Greek tragedy. In this beautiful and indispensable book, he renders the poetry of Sophocles as no one has done before. In Gibbons's hands, the complex power and musical precision of Sophoclean song and verse radiate a verbal and imagistic energy that feels both ancient and immediate."--Alan Shapiro, author of Old War: Poems

"Attuned to the nuances of the original, Gibbons's verse delivers a Sophoclean stateliness of bearing in an idiom that is supple enough to communicate the heat of Eros, the horror of war, and the awe inspired by the natural world."--Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry: Poems

"To read these dramatic odes as poems is invigorating and invites us to see Sophocles in a new way. And making poems out of the fragments and including them alongside the odes is a brilliant stroke, providing instances of the Sophoclean lyric imagination. These translations are remarkably true to the Greek."--Stephen Scully, Boston University

Media reviews

Citations

• Choice, 04/01/2009, Page 0
• Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/14/2008, Page 20