The Four Gentlemen and Their Footman, by Roger Weingarten

Largely due to the novelistic structure of his second book, Ethan Benjamin Boldt, some critics tagged Roger Weingarten as a narrative poet. What they missed is the lyric element in his work: meditative, linguistically wild, and sometimes satiric. Weingarten is an iconoclast who should be read like Pound. The Four Gentlemen and Their Footman is his postmodern take on High Modernism, a multilayered meditation on the nature of being, a self-skewering, conflicted, and impassioned Roman a clef told in a voice full of riddles and double entendre, occasionally in other languages, as if the mishaps of the poet’s life were the stuff of black comedy–his objective correlative. -Marcus Cafagna