“William Heyen’s music and meditations continue to amaze. I’ve now read and absorbed all the poems of A Poetics of Hiroshima. I am not ready to write anything about them, except to express my awe.”-Cynthia Ozick

“A remarkable poet in whom the ‘visionary’ and the unblinkingly ‘historical’ are dramatically meshed. He writes with the wild, radiant audacity of the visionary; yet his eye and ear are sharp, unsparing.”-Joyce Carol Oates

In A Poetics of Hiroshima, William Heyen, described by Elizabeth Spires as “our poet of history,” has broken through to face full square what has been working its way to surface through several of his highly-praised earlier books including Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (Time Being Books, 1991) and Shoah Train (Etruscan, 2003): the interfusions, in art and in our desire for art, of beauty and atrocity.  Heyen’s lines claw their ways into an aesthetics of formful but obscene sound that may now be our century’s only viable, or possible, home. 

The author of eighteen books of poetry, Etruscan Advisory Board member William Heyen has been awarded Fulbright, NEA, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Guggenheim fellowships and prizes.  His Etruscan books include the anthology September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002) and the poetry books The Confessions of Doc Williams and Other Poems (2006) and Shoah Train, which was a National Book Award finalist in 2004.

Publication date: December 2008

Read an excerpt of A Poetics of Hiroshima.