I've been reading two books from the 70s, Viper Jazz (Tate) and Millions of Strange Shadows (Hecht). Both poets are prodigiously talented within their respective styles, but both seems to be floundering here. Hecht is writing in the period style of the 1950s: his ideal addressee is a college professor from about 1950. I can almost smell the pipe tobacco and the tweed. I had remembered his translation of Voltaire's poem about the Lisbon earthquake from when I first read this book in the 1970s. It is a tour de force. His "Sestina D'Inverno" is good, although not quite as good as sestinas by Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, or John Ashbery. Hecht has a redundancy problem: "Such music becomes the trope / Or figure of that holy amity / Which is our only hope." A trope is the same thing as a figure, and amity is there to rhyme with Galilee later on in the stanza. "That dense, embroidered art / Of interleaved and deftly braided song." Braided means the same thing here as interleaved. The tweedy college professor can apparently understand a whole series of complex illusions but has to have the metaphors pedantically explained to him: this symbolizes that. There are also moments of outright banality: "A certain amount of getting up and down / From my aisle seat to let the others in." Talk about loading every rift with ore! I had frankly expected more elegance from Hecht; his style is more knotty and clumpy than I had remembered.

Tate is a different story. The jokes just don't work half the time. Maybe you had to be there.