Dante in China
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€18.99
In John Barr's poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world. Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: “Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful.” Bach’s final fugue informs all of nature. Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan. Aristotle finds “Demagogues are the insects of politics. / Like water beetles they stay afloat / on surface tension, they taxi on iridescence.” And his afterlife: “When three-headed Cerberus greeted him / Socrates replied: I won’t need / an attack dog, thank
you. I married one.”
John Barr was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in a rural township outside of Chicago. Graduating from Harvard College on a Navy scholarship, he served five years on
ships including three tours to Vietnam. Over a thirty-year career as an investment banker, he was Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and founded three startups. He has taught
in the Graduate Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College and served on the boards of Yaddo, Bennington College, and the Poetry Society of America, the latter two as board
chair. In 2004, he was appointed the inaugural president of the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and served in that capacity for a decade. Dante in China is his ninth collection of poems. He lives in Connecticut.