Eine Klage-Welt

A review of Philip Dacey's The Mystery of Max Schmitt at The Pedestal Magazine

Contemporary poetry is sometimes accused of not being about anything in particular, and, on a bad day, a reader might tend to agree. The literary journals can seem a bottomless source of inconclusive personal anecdote, shot through here and there with glimmers of private feeling that do not add up to much at all. Happily, on a good day, one can answer the accusers with such an accomplished and humane book as Philip Dacey’s The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins.