To "modern life"—surrealist dreams,
         The existential at extremes,
         Group sex and its well-planned disasters.
         I wound up with Johnson's Masters.

There are only a half-dozen poets writing today with the technical prowess, moral intelligence, and exuberant gravity of Dr. Johnson's masters. Anthony Hecht is one of them. Much of his new book [The Venetian Vespers] started elsewhere, and he has made his own—a brace of caustic imitations of Horace, one of Ronsard, and two padded but affecting translations from the Russian of Joseph Brodsky. There are ten original poems as well, four of some length. The shorter poems show off Hecht's celebrated ability to move through a network of images and abstract ideas—whether exotic or familiar—by means of nimbly rhymed, occasionally very intricate stanzas, each an added shade of feeling or feat of association. But longer poems have always elicited—in these new instances...