How to describe you save as a reliquary,

A masterwork fashioned from hope and bold-

Faced fictions containing a dubious relic? Query

The lost, loquacious seventeen-year-old,

And he will tell you again the mouldy tales he told

This too credulous solitary

Common scold, a literal truth fairy,

While his eyes beamed silver and his locks gleamed gold

From "A Reliquary"

A Reliquary, Daryl Hine's final collection of poetry, completed just months before he died, is a portrait of the poet aging It is elegies for lost friends and odes to absent ones, the poet himself suffering in sickness yet never despondent There is real joy here, a vivacious voice confined to a wheelchair and singing out to the world The poems themselves are both relics contained within a reliquary and the reliquary itself, yet they are also alive with the witty and masterful plays of language for which Hine is best known

Born in 1936, and raised in New Westminster, British Columbia, Daryl Hine studied classics and philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of Poetry magazine from 1968 to 1978, and taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a poet, Hine was known for his learned wit, formal mastery, and cosmopolitan sensibility. He published eighteen volumes of poetry, several works of prose and verse drama, and five books of translations from ancient Greek and Latin poets. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1986, among other awards. In 2010 he was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry. Hine died in 2012 in Evanston, Illinois, at the age of 76.

Daryl Hine's profile page