The Next Bend in the Road

"In America today there is no lyric work more compelling and well made than To the Center of the Earth," Allen Grossman wrote ten years ago of Michael Fried's last collection of poetry. Fried's new book, The Next Bend in the Road, is a powerfully coherent gathering of lyric and prose poems that has the internal scope of a novel with a host of characters, from the poet's wife and daughter to Franz Kafka, Paul Cezanne, Osip Mandelstam, Sigmund Freud, Gisele Lestrange, and many others; transformative encounters with works of art, literature, and philosophy, including Heinrich von Kleist's "The Earthquake in Chile," Giuseppe Ungaretti's "Veglia," and Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe; and, running through the book from beginning to end, a haunted awareness of the entanglement of the noblest accomplishments and the most intimate joys with the horrors of modern history.

Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two previous books of poems, Powers and To the Center of the Earth, as well as numerous works in art history and criticism, including Art and Objecthood and Manet's Modernism, both published by the University of Chicago Press. In the spring of 2002 he gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art.