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Prize for a life’s work in poetry
Ferry receives Lenore Marshall

By Eric McHenry

David Ferry’s reputation as a translator does more than just precede him: it precedes everything. The Western canon, Harold Bloom writes in his 1994 bestseller of that title, begins with the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, and Ferry’s is the essential translation.

But the three collections of original poetry Ferry has published, Mary Kinzie notes in the October 16 issue of The Nation, "did not meet with fanfare" when they first appeared. That has come only with the publication of Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which was recently named the winner of the 2000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Ferry, a professor emeritus of English at Wellesley College, who will teach in BU’s graduate Creative Writing Program next semester, is neither a fast nor a flashy writer: twenty-three years separated his slim first and second volumes, and the poems are uncommonly subtle and plain-of-diction. Now that most of his oeuvre has been gathered in one volume, however, the literary community is beginning to recognize the breadth of his achievement.

"[T]he work is brilliant with the certainty that comes with contemplation," writes Kinzie, who chaired the Lenore Marshall Prize panel. "David Ferry’s poems are defined as remarkably by the virtues of theme as by those of style. Plainness grows eloquent as it moves across the subjects of true feeling, from an un-self-pitying awareness that is perhaps more Greek than Roman to a generosity of mind that works in parallel with that awareness."

The Lenore Marshall Prize, administered by the Academy of American Poets and The Nation, is among the most prestigious a poet can win. Three distinguished poets select the best American book of the previous year. Robert Pinsky, CAS professor of English and former U.S. poet laureate, was awarded the prize in 1997 for his own new and selected volume, The Figured Wheel. The group of finalists from which Of No Country I Know was chosen included this year’s Pulitzer Prize—winner, C. K. Williams’ Repair. Ferry received $10,000 and the essay of appreciation by Kinzie,
whose writing he greatly admires. "It creates sophistication by demanding it of the reader," he says. Accompanied by a selection of poems from the book, the essay contains scrupulously close readings of several passages.

"Ferry’s diction is so transparent and accurate," Kinzie writes, "that we do not balk when great symbols flare out. A boy riding his bike to the drugstore becomes regal, ‘All-conquering,’ ‘his bare // Chest flashing like a shield in the summer air.’"

Of No Country I Know comprises the complete texts of Ferry’s second and third books of poems, Strangers and Dwelling Places, a generous selection from his first, On the Way to the Island, excerpts from his translations of Gilgamesh, The Odes of Horace, The Eclogues of Virgil, and the forthcoming Epistles of Horace, and a good deal of new work. It also received the Bingham Poetry Prize from the Boston Book Review and was a finalist for the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and the first annual New Yorker Book Award for poetry.

Ferry hasn’t written much original poetry since completing Of No Country I Know. He’s had his hands full, he says, with the epistles and his most recent translation project, the georgics of Virgil, "which may explain why I haven’t actually written much.

"But I’m a very slow writer anyway," he says, "so it doesn’t feel all that different. It feels, in a way, like more of the same."

4 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations