Lannan Foundation

Peter Sacks, Poet - Marfa, Summer 1999

Mr. Sacks’s books of poetry include In These Mountains, Promised Lands, and the recent Natal Command. He is also the author of The English Elegy: Studies in Genre from Spenser to Yeats.

Born in South Africa in 1950, he fled his native country during the apartheid era to avoid fighting racial wars in the army. He has said, “I was raised in South Africa. I am now an expatriate, but I am still caught up in that country’s history. My work in poetry has usually sought to balance an openness to physical beauty on the one hand against historical suffering on the other.”

Mr. Sacks, who teaches English at Harvard University, is also working on a book on Leonardo da Vinci. Mr. Sacks’s residency in Marfa lasted two months.