To the center of the earth

the long version

To the Center of the Earth is the first collection of Michael Fried's poems to appear in the United States. It includes a selection of poems from an earlier volume, Powers, published in England in the seventies, along with more recent work. The keynote of all the poems is lyrical intensity, which at times reaches visionary levels. Many of the poems are brief, but none is small or slight: they combine sensory precision of great vividness with a deep-grounded musicality that gives to their rhythmic and syntactic structures an unexpected and wholly original power of expansion. At the same time, what Ian Hamilton has called their "present-tense insistence on the totality of the poem," both as evocation of passionate experience and as verbal artifact, links them with the abstract painting and sculpture that Fried has championed in his art criticism. For all their economy, Michael Fried's "muscular, tense and immensely resonant" poems, to quote one critic on Powers, are among the most sensuously direct and arresting being written today.