The perennially boyish Richard Wilbur may be the first American poet to write decent verse at ninety—most poets have trouble at seventy, or fifty, or thirty. Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus at ninety, but poems of grace and depth are more likely to be written when the poet is still young and foolish. Wilbur was never the darkest of American poets—a kind of moral sunniness was always breaking in. He was sunny the way Frost can be sunny, though Frost is sunny only by cutting out three-quarters of his poems. Wilbur was the Frost left over, the Frost of most high-school anthologies.

Anterooms is a thin book, fattened with more blank pages than is healthy.[1] In these not quite two-dozen new poems (with a handful of translations and a fresh flurry of riddles by the Latin poet Symphosius added as...

 

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Richard Wilbur
Anterooms: New Poems and Translations
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 80 pages, $20.00
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Yusef Komunyakaa
The Chameleon Couch: Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 128 pages, $24.00
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Carl Phillips
Double Shadow: Poems (Los Angeles Times Book Award: Poetry)
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Rae Armantrout
Money Shot (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
Wesleyan, 92 pages, $24.95
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Les Murray
Taller When Prone: Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 96 pages, $24.00
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Les Murray
Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 96 pages, $13.00
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Geoffrey Hill
Oraclau | Oracles - Daybooks III
Clutag Press, 0 pages
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