November 1st, 2007
Robert Mezey
Robert Mezey was educated at Kenyon, Iowa, and Stanford. He has taught at Western Reserve, Fresno State, University of Utah, Franklin & Marshall, and elsewhere, and from 1976 to 2002, he was professor and poet-in-residence at Pomona College, also teaching occasionally at the Claremont Graduate School.
His poems, prose, and translations have been appearing since 1953 in many journals, including New York Review of Books, Hudson Review, New Yorker, New Republic, Raritan, Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Poetry, and others. His poems have been frequently anthologized, and some have been translated and printed in Italy, Spain, Israel, and Greece.
His books include The Lovemaker, A Book of Dying, White Blossoms, The Door Standing Open, Small Song, Couplets, Selected Translations, Evening Wind, and Collected Poems: 1952-1999. He has edited several books, including The Poetry of E. A. Robinson (Modern Library), Poems of the American West (Random House), Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics), and Poems from the Hebrew. With Dick Barnes, he has translated all of Borges’ poems, many of which have appeared in journals and magazines.
He has been awarded the Robert Frost Prize, the Stegner Fellowship, the Lamont Prize, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN prize, a Bassine Citation, the Poets Prize, the Barnstone Translation Prize, the Trustees’ Medal of Merit from Pomona College, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Another Day
for Ollie, as always
It’s Hallowe’en again—ooh, very scary,
Come face to face once more with the abyss,
Which waits for all, the wary and unwary,
Believer and infidel. For you, I know,
There’s nothing at all scary about this.
There’s no abyss, no nether world, no end,
Only an interval, a gathering round,
A sort of tiring-house from which we go
—To what? Ah, here my imagination fails me.
With or without wings? naked? shrouded? gowned?
Or disembodied consciousness? Not mine:
Mine is composed of earth and the things of earth
And every atom in my body tells me
Spirit and matter are one, and will decline
Together back to the darkness before birth;
I will cease to be I, I will not know
Even the instant when my remnants meet
Blessèd oblivion, infinitely forgiving,
Perpetual peace and silence and complete
Absence of pain. Now that’s what I call living.
