Next Bend in the Road

&quote;In America today there is no lyric work more compelling and well made than To the Center of the Earth,&quote; Allen Grossman wrote ten years ago of Michael Fried's last collection of poetry. Fried's new book, The Next Bend in the Road, is a powerfully coherent gathering of lyric and prose poems that has the internal scope of a novel with a host of characters, from the poet's wife and 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 &quote;The Earthquake in Chile,&quote; Giuseppe Ungaretti's &quote;Veglia,&quote; and Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe; and, running through the book from beginning to end, a haunted awareness of the entanglement of the noblest accomplishments and the most intimate joys with the horrors of modern history.