William Matthews
“Suppose that, like the ancient Greeks, we have a religious drama, and it turns out to be soap opera. Suppose that a skillful and cheeky poet saw in this circumstance not a falling away from a Golden Age but an opportunity to write, in both high style and a wicked parody of high style, about the emotional life of the tribe. You’d have this book.”
Gerald Stern
“Katrovas’s Dithyrambs remind me of a contemporary Auden—more perhaps Auden’s plays than his poems—formalizing, as he abstracts them and makes them musical, the desires, fears, and confusions of our age. They are funny, passionate, nervous—maybe the way choruses were meant to be in the first place—tender and daring. They are intense emotion locked in musical boxes, singing while exploding.”
Carolyn Forche
“In his Dithyrambs, Richard Katrovas revives the choral lyric form of Bacchylides and Pindar, and following Dryden as the single modern precursor, bravely explores the form’s possibilities for late twentieth century verse. These vehement, ecstatic, gnomic choral voices most resemble the exuberance of the raucous, participatory audiences of contemporary ‘talk television,’ ingeniously interspersed with dramatic monologues addressed to the imaginary world of television land. His parodies rise to high camp, while somehow never quite forsaking the pathos of genuine desire.”
Donald Justice
“Originality of this kind is rare . . . large and ambitious. Katrovas’s dithyrambs—and they really are a modern version of that ancient rhapsodic form—make for a bold and fascinating experiment.”
