Beautiful False Things

This volume from the two-time National Book Award-finalist offers “splashes of beauty, yes–but also a fountain of shameless knowing and inspired telling” (Cynthia Ozick).   This tenth collection of Irving Feldman’s poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized to be a body of work singular in its extravagant wit, powerful storytelling, variety of voices and range of feeling—playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things: the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of “Funny Bones’ duels with death in Florida; in “Oedipus Host,” Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky, feminist heroine of “Heavenly Muse” visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, “translation” comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back.   The renowned poet J. D. McClatchy called Feldman “our best fabulist, Franz Kafka’s imagination combined with S. J. Perelman’s ear, and everywhere his own buoyant, driving line.” The poems collected here demonstrate why the Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist is deserving of such high praise.