Charles Martin's poetry defies the popular notion that traditional forms can no longer adequately express contemporary life and speech in all their brawling multiplicity. Even a cursory glance at his work shows that he can make a line of metrical verse sonorous or playful, elegiac or mercurial. Martin demonstrates, through deep feeling and an often acid wit, the enduring ability of formal verse to perform feats of maverick virtuosity within a seamlessly modern idiom.

Of German and Irish extraction, Charles Frederick Martin is a native New Yorker, born on 25 June 1942 in the Bronx to Charles Justus Martin, a salesman, and Kathleen (née McCormack) Martin. He has one sister, Marilyn, born in 1948. Educated in Catholic schools as a boy, he later attended the Jesuit-run Fordham University, where he earned an A.B. in English in 1964. An early interest in the relationship between the classic and the modern...