The Returns: Collected Poems

Alfred Corn began his career as a poet in 1972 with publications in SATURDAY REVIEW and POEM. Fifty years later, THE RETURNS: COLLECTED POEMS draws from nine of Corn's eleven volumes of poetry.

About the Author :
Alfred Corn has published eleven books of poems, two novels, and three collections of critical essays. He has received the Guggenheim fellowship, the NEA, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, the University of Cincinnati, and UCLA. In 2013, he was made a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2016, Chamán Ediciones in Spain published Rocinante, a selection of his work translated into Spanish, the same translation appearing the following year in Mexico under the title Antonio en el desierto. He has published translations from classical Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. His own poems have also been translated into Italian, French, German, and Turkish. In October of 2016, Roads Taken, a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Alfred Corn's first book, All Roads at Once, was held at Poets House in New York City, and in 2017 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Last year he published a new version Rilke's Duino Elegies. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Review :
Alfred Corn is a national resource, a bard of astonishing breadth. -Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alfred Corn is one of our finest living poets....Best of all, despite the largeness of his expec-tations, Corn is no softie. He eschews sentimentality. He is humorous, observant, quick to see awkward details, human failings, ironic mishaps. -Grace Schulman, The Nation Alfred Corn has enormous resources at work in his poems: wit, strength, sureness of touch. The poems interweave the strands of a world touchingly recollected, and of a world jubilantly imagined. -Anthony Hecht Alfred Corn's poems are exquisite, formal. They show a rare breadth of experience, observation and perception. -Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch I know of nothing else of such ambition and realized power in Corn's own generation of American poets. He has had the skill and courage to confront, absorb, and renew our poetic tradition at its most vital. -Harold Bloom Few poets of our time have drawn upon the wisdom of experience with such unaffected honesty and tactful skill. If Corn continues to write verse of such resonance, he will be a very important American poet indeed; as it is, at the age of 37, he stands at the forefront of his generation. -Robert Shaw, The Nation Whether writing in free verse or magically weaving in strict rhyme patterns, Corn combines memory and imagination into long, meditative poems that digress but never lose our interest. -Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal What gives Corn's work its force is that its elegance and control is never an end in itself. His poetry is for poetry's sake, no doubt, but it is more urgently concerned with life. -Matthew Gilbert, Boston Review [Alfred Corn] understands art to be "always more than technical virtuosity," his poetry never merely displays his considerable poetic skills, but rather becomes a mode of thought, an inquiry into art and passion, the limits of mastery, mortality, divinity, and the possible destiny of the human soul. -Carolyn Forché