Peter Filkins, a poet and translator, has a forthcoming collection of poems, After Homer, due to be published in January by George Braziller Books. Filkins is the author of a book of poems, What She Knew, and his translation of a novel by Alois Hotschnig, Leonardo's Hands, was published in 1999. His translation of the complete poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight, was named an outstanding translation of 1994 by the American Literary Translators Association.

His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in the New Republic, the American Scholar, New Criterion, Paris Review, Agni, American Poetry Review, Partisan Review, Iowa Review, the Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Contemporary Literary Criticism, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the New York Times Book Review.

Filkins studied with Joseph Brodsky at Columbia University, where he earned an MFA in poetry, and was a Fulbright Fellow in German at the University of Vienna from 1983 to 1985. He has held residencies at the Yaddo Artists Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Filkins currently teaches and is the head of the Poetry & Fiction Series at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, MA.

Derek Alger: I see that your upcoming book of poems, After Homer, is
dedicated to Joseph Brodsky. He must have had a great influence on you.

Peter Filkins: I had the good fortune to study with Joseph Brodsky at Columbia University in the early '80s. He meant a lot to me as a teacher and a poet. In fact, there's an elegy to him in the book.

DA: How would you describe the poems in your book? Is there a special theme?

PF: Some of the concerns of the book touch on the same concerns Brodsky was interested in. An ability and a desire to look at how concerns in different eras span across time. How poems in the book speak to Chekhov, the sinking of the Luisitania, Benvenuto Cellini, the Persian Gulf War, and passages from Homer's Iliad. I was interested in how different eras speak to each other at the same time. It's not a book of different historical moments but how they speak to each other. Brodsky had a way of doing this; he had a broad range.

DA: How does After Homer compare with your first book of poems?

PF: After Homer is a different book than What She Knew, though of course that may be more apparent to me than to others. Nonetheless, I feel the first book was very meditative, very ethereal in its approach to everyday things, whereas the new work is a bit more direct.

I don't really think of the new poems as better — just different. It's more like the first book is about how I think, whereas the second is more involved with how I feel. The truth most likely lies somewhere in between; the two dovetail with one another to make a complete whole.