The Man in the Wall: 0759 (New Directions Paperbook) - Hardcover

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevates his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war - Laughlin's muse speaks of all these things with a fresh directness that makes his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin's efforts as publisher and poet have been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him is, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a "continuous present" in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin's doppelganger, Hiram Handspring. The Man in the Wall follows Laughlin's recent Collected Poems (Moyer Bell Limited).

James Laughlin (1914-1997) founded New Directions in 1936 while still a student at Harvard. He wrote and compiled more than a dozen books of poetry as well as stories and essays; seven volumes of his correspondence with his authors are available from W.W. Norton.