Contradictions of the Heart
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 27, 2012
JONATHAN GALASSI likes to say that he has “backed into” most of the things he has wound up doing in life. If that’s the case, he has reversed himself into some pretty nice spots. He is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy and an acclaimed translator of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. In New York publishing circles he is greatly admired for running a publishing house that is both commercially viable and a home for Nobel Prize winners and books of high literary quality.
Mr. Galassi is also a poet, and his new book, “Left-handed,” will be released by Alfred A. Knopf in March. If you read it carefully enough, “Left-handed” has a plot of sorts, the same one that propels the recent movie “Beginners,” and is an important subtext of Chad Harbach’s best-selling novel “The Art of Fielding.” “Left-handed” is the story of a married, middle-aged man who backs into being gay.
“It’s about me,” Mr. Galassi said last month over lunch at the Union Square Cafe, where he presides almost daily at a corner table. “I’m not hiding behind a persona. The story is the change in the speaker — in his mind. In a way nothing happens, and yet everything happens.” He added: “I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.”
The first part of the book, “A Clean Slate,” is about middle-aged feelings of regret, longing and a sense of impending mortality. “I want spring to come because/I want upheaval, flooding/the excitement of the primal rite,” the speaker says in one poem, and then adds: “And I don’t want spring to come/because it means another, one less spring.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/nyregion/for-jonathan-galassi-unveiling-the-heart-in-poems.html
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