"Hecht's highly formal poems sound majestic, orderly, and intense. He is one of the contemporary masters . . . of the high traditional English style . . . whatever poetry is supposed to do, it seldom gets more precise and articulate."
-Peter Davison,
Boston Globe
"Formal and exacting . . . [Hecht's] elegant, insistent humanity, surfacing persistently like springs among the severe crags of his dark morality, will give his poetry life and interest long after the smoother pebbles of today's more popular voices are washed to silence by the sea."
-Cynthia Haven,
Washington Post Book World "Hecht is . . . one of the great synthesizers of the modern moment, a vistionary poet capable of conveying private experience in public forms . . . No other poet in English has fashioned such disillusioned beauty."
-David Mason,
The Weekly Standard
"This book is a magnificent addition to the library of any reader who still values verse."
-John Mark Eberhart,
Kansas City Star
In honor of his eightieth birthday, an omnibus edition brings together selections from the poet's three most recent collections--The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Darkness and the Light--in which he contemplates the mortal fate of humankind with trademark wit, insight, and dark humor. Reprint.