Opus Posthumous and Other Poems

David R. Slavitt has published more than 120 books of poetry, fiction, and translation. Born in White Plains, New York, and educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia, Slavitt has worked at Newsweek and taught at Temple University, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Bennington College.

[Previous praise] [Slavitt's] range in forms, tones of voice, and subject matter is wide and various. He shows that he can handle all kinds of tough, tricky forms, and that he likes forms. He is perfectly at home in many rhythms, formal and syncopated. The language is brilliant, the range almost complete (from Ronald Firbank to Lenny Bruce and Dave Gardner). He can be witty or can crack wise as the occasion demands. Above all, he can think in verse, thus inviting the reader to use his intelligence, too.-- "George Garrett in "The Hollins Critic"" [Previous praise] The power of narrative to transform the events it recounts is among the most rewarding mysteries by which we can be absorbed. David Slavitt is among the most accomplished living practitioners of that art, in both prose and verse; his poems give us a pleasurable, beautiful way of meditating on a bad time. We can't ask much more of literature, and usually we get far less.-- "Henry Taylor in "Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets"" [Previous praise] A serious force in contemporary letters. . . . Witty, graceful, and accessible.-- "Virginia Quarterly Review" [Previous praise] Slavitt's imagination is equally at home breathing twentieth-century life into historical and classical figures and discovering the poetry of everyday activities.-- "Library Journal"