A Reliquary and Other Poems

By Daryl Hine

How to describe you save as a reliquary,

A masterwork fashioned from hope and bold-
Faced fictions containing a dubious relic? Query
The lost, loquacious seventeen-year-old,
And he will tell you again the mouldy tales he told
This too credulous solitary
Common scold, a literal truth fairy,
While his eyes beamed silver and his locks gleamed gold.
From "A Reliquary"
A Reliquary, Daryl Hine's final collection of poetry, completed just months before he died, is a portrait of the poet aging. It is elegies for lost friends and odes to absent ones, the poet himself suffering in sickness yet never despondent. There is real joy here, a vivacious voice confined to a wheelchair and singing out to the world. The poems themselves are both relics contained within a reliquary and the reliquary itself, yet they are also alive with the witty and masterful plays of language for which Hine is best known.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1554552257
• ISBN13: 9781554552252
• Release Date: March 2013
• Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.7" x 8.8"