Peter Viereck’s career in poetry is an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. In Tide and Continuities that experiment has yielded its finest results. Included are many new poems, never before published, and stunning revisions from work as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Terror and Decorum.
This collection is the revelation of a great American poet. The Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky calls Viereck “possibly the greatest rhymer of / the modern period.” This is Viereck’s most lyrical, most passionate book; hence Brodsky rhymes “lyric” with “Viereck.”
Tide and Continuities marks Viereck’s complete evolution as a poet, and brilliantly describes the arc of more than a half century’s work.
Peter Viereck, now age , won a Pulitzer Prize for Terror and Decorum and is the only American scholar who has received Guggenheim Fellowships in both poetry and history. In each of these disciplines, he has written eight books. Born in New York City in , he studied at Harvard and Oxford and served in the United States Army during World War II in Africa and Italy. He is professor emeritus at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachu setts, where he still teaches Russian history.
“Peter Viereck is one of the true originals of contemporary American letters, always resolutely faithful to and wonderfully expressive of his own quirky, witty, often brilliant vision of modern life with its contradictions and tribulations. He is a pioneer in the domain where art and history intersect.”
—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
“Viereck’s talent rises like a lovely bird. . . in the purest sense—lyrical, sensitive, distinguished in feeling.”
—William Carlos Williams
“. . . Viereck is still an extraordinary embodier and animator of concepts, writing with unwearied invention in a language both jazzy and exalted.”
—Richard Wilbur
