A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey

D. M. Spitzer's collection unfolds a poetic engagement with the Greek Odyssey within the framework of the ancient epic: twenty-four books and a well-known and complex narrative architecture. The poems inhabit a range of voices and perspectives drawn from both the world of Homer's Odyssey and from that of the poet-as-reader.

Each poem in A Heaven Wrought of Iron offers a fresh approach to--and in collaboration with--the Odyssey by weaving together translated fragments from the Greek text with a sequence of poems drawn from a close reading of and an imaginative, intellectual engagement with the Odyssey.

After pursuing graduate studies in political thought, philosophy, and classics, D. M. Spitzer completed a Master of Fine Arts in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

His current projects include a hybrid work called Genealogy of the First Person that treats some of the principal figures of the Book of Genesis as paradigmatic of a mode of consciousness; mousika, a collection of two poetic sequences: the first, ＂quartet,＂ takes up a conversation with T. S. Eliot’s masterwork ＂Four Quartets,＂ while the second section, ＂a symphony of psalms,＂ works from an imaginative engagement with Igor Stravinsky’s ＂Symphony of Psalms;＂ and a performance-poetry project, involving movement and costuming, called ＂kata-strophe,＂ which features three transfigured poems (Goethe’s ＂Erlkonig,＂ Rilke’s ＂die Blinde,＂ and Ovid’s final scene of Orpheus & Eurydike [Book 10.56-61]).

Mr. Spitzer resides in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with his wife and their three children. He is currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at Binghamton University.