The latest dazzling collection of poems from Charles Martin, a modern
poet working within the possibilities of traditional measures.
To be modern is to live not in a single era, but in a churn of new
technologies, deep history, myth, literary traditions, and contemporary
cultural memes. In Future Perfect, Charles Martin's darkly comic new
collection, the poet explores our time and the times that come before
and after, which we inhabit and cultivate in memory and imagination.
Through poems that play with form and challenge expectation, Martin
examines the continuities that persist from time immemorial to the
future perfect.
Sensitive to the traces left behind by the lives of his characters,
Martin follows their tracks, reflections, echoes, and shadows. In "From
Certain Footprints Found at Laetoli," an ancient impression preserved in
volcanic ash conjures up a family scene three million years past. In
"The Last Resort of Mr. Kees" and "Mr. Kees Goes to a Party," Martin
adopts the persona of the vanished poet Weldon Kees to reimagine his
disappearance. "Letter from Komarovo, 1962" retells the tense real-life
meeting between Anna Akhmatova and Robert Frost a year before their
nations almost destroyed one another. And in the titular sonnet sequence
that ends the book, Martin conjures a childhood in the Bronx under the
shadow of the mushroom cloud of nuclear war as the perfected future
supplanting the present.
Introducing Buck Rogers to Randall Jarrell and combining new
translations or reinterpretations of works by Ovid, G. G. Belli, Octavio
Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin
as a master of invention.
