Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Horses
It is true that, as he said, the horses,
When the lightning signaled something
Along the horizon, acknowledged the signaling,
Moving about in extraordinary beauty
Of shifting and neighing, flicker of ear,
Changings of pace, slidings, turnings,
The delicate legs finding out something
The ground could tell them, interpreting
The sky’s statement of oncoming darkness.
The storm was doing whatever it does,
Matrix of signaling, along the horizon.
In the valley the houses were brilliantly
Clear, the storm’s darkness was making
Possible a perfect delineation,
The houses’ edges brimming with light.
David Ferry (1924–2023) was a profoundly influential poet and translator whose channeling of the ancient world reanimated some of the greatest classics of Western and Middle Eastern poetry. His final book, Some Things I Said, coedited by his close friend George Kalogeris and his children, Elizabeth and Stephen Ferry, reached his hands just days before he died at ninety-nine on November 5, 2023. Late work in Ferry’s case was great work. He completed his “vigorous, intimate” (New York Times) translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in his nineties (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and published Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Chicago, 2012) in his eighties; it won the National Book Award in Poetry. Other volumes that feature his own poems include On This Side of the River: Selected Poems (The Waywiser Press [U.K], 2012), Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Chicago, 1999), and Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (Chicago, 1993). Other volumes of translation include The Georgics of Virgil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), The Eclogues of Virgil (FSG, 2000), The Odes of Horace (FSG, 1998), and Gilgamesh (FSG, 1992). In 2011 he received the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth B. Lilly Prize “for lifetime achievement.” A beloved member of our Boston community, he published in AGNI across three decades.
Ferry’s translation The Odes of Horace was reviewed in AGNI 48 by Christopher Davis.