Singularly Remote

For a growing contingent of devotees in the English-speaking world, the brilliant Mexican and Italian literary critic Mario Murgia is a beacon. He reads the great canonical poets, from Dante and Chaucer to Elizabeth Bishop, Borges, and Geoffrey Hill, with freshness and startling insight, joining “distant reading” to the existential phenomenon of cultural distance. A Milton scholar (among many other things), he meditates on the relevance of that austere poet in four languages to a world in which translation has become central. There are new presences as well in this book, poets beyond the canon or on its periphery. —Gordon Teskey,