Irving Feldman is one of the rare American poets who have made a successful crossing from high modernism to what is generally labeled the postmodernist era. He has continuously revised his style and reimagined his poetic personae, while at the same time remaining true to a sensibility that combines Jewish earnestness and moral intensity with vigorous humor and a skepticism tempered by hope. His work has become, during the past three and a half decades, more distinctive and confident. In retrospect he may turn out to have been one of the few poets to have reflected, or perhaps even to have defined with prescience, American culture and sensibility at the end of the twentieth century.

Irving Mordecai Feldman was born on 22 September 1928 in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Russian Jews who came to America in 1906. Like many children of immigrant parents, Feldman...