Anthony Hecht certainly practices the poetry of limits. Yet he often handles obnoxious subjects: a description of the rotting corpse of a monkey ("Alceste in the Wilderness"), the horrors of war ("Christmas Is Coming," "Drinking Song," etc.), the destruction of the Jews ("Rites and Ceremonies"), the Lisbon earthquake. One of his least forgettable poems tells of the capture, humiliation, torture, and flaying of the Roman emperor Valerian ("Behold the Lilies of the Field"). But he manages the frightfulness within a perceptible design….

When Hecht takes up quickening subjects—fatherhood, the praise of landscape, sexual tenderness—his sweet-and-sour tone gains force from hints that he also has in mind the death-bearing experiences. A knowledge of pain refines the edge of pleasure, as a knowledge of pleasure sharpens the acid of pain. It seems appropriate that Hecht likes to indulge in oxymoron: "dirge of birth" ("An Autumnal"), "awkward grace" ("Peripeteia...