King of a Hundred Horsemen

Marie Étienne's poetry is inspired by the synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane--the quotidian transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. Through a profound and complex reinterpretation of the sonnet form, the book reflects, as in a mosaic of shattered mirrors, many of the writer's ongoing preoccupations: the relationship of East and West; an eroticism at once physical and cerebral; the interaction of poetry and prose; the strange blending of the everyday and the foreign, in which the most "exotic" journeys become ordinary and the most ordinary displacements partake of the strange. King of a Hundred Horsemen--in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series's first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007--is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet.