Promesse du Bonheur

Michael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, Promesse du Bonheur. Fried’s passion, lyricism, and humor, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J.M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art. Along the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete. Beyond presenting new works, Promesse du Bonheur breaks ground for Fried by combining eighty poems, a mix of lyric and prose poems, with thirty-three photographs, most of them made, all of them chosen by renowned American photographer James Welling. The photographs throughout often stand in oblique relation to the poems, and must be interpreted in their own right, as images and as complementary pieces of this mesmerizing whole. Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s urging in “Self-Reliance”— “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events”—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet’s tragic loss of memory, from exemplary works and persons such as Degas’s The Fallen Jockey, Kleist’s Prince of Homburg, Menzel’s drawings, Édouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age. Promesse du Bonheur is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wideranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader/viewer in its spell from first page to last.