Beautiful False Things: Poems

By: Irving Feldman

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Synopsis: This volume from the two-time National Book Award-finalist offers &“splashes of beauty, yes–but also a fountain of shameless knowing and inspired telling&” (Cynthia Ozick). This tenth collection of Irving Feldman&’s poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized to be a body of work singular in its extravagant wit, powerful storytelling, variety of voices and range of feeling—playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things: the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of &“Funny Bones&’ duels with death in Florida; in &“Oedipus Host,&” Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky, feminist heroine of &“Heavenly Muse&” visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, &“translation&” comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back. The renowned poet J. D. McClatchy called Feldman &“our best fabulist, Franz Kafka&’s imagination combined with S. J. Perelman&’s ear, and everywhere his own buoyant, driving line.&” The poems collected here demonstrate why the Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist is deserving of such high praise.