In his latest book of poetry, Michael Fried continues his pursuit of lyric intensity but greatly expands his range of subject matter. The Next Bend in the Road is a powerfully coherent book of lyric and prose poems that has the internal scope of a novel with a host of characters, from the poet's wife and adopted daughter to Franz Kafka, Paul Cezanne, Osip Mandelstam, Sigmund Freud, Gisele Lestrange, and many others, transformative encounters with works of art, literature, and philosophy, including Heinrich von Kleist's The Earthquake in Chile, Giuseppe Ungaretti's "Veglia," and Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe; and running through the book from beginning to end, an appalled awareness of the entanglement of the noblest accomplishments and the most intimate joys with the horrors of modern history.
