Frank Bidart has always defied expectation and convention without ever sounding conscious of such an effort or veering into self-parody. Bidart s poetry is often all at once deeply generous of spirit, terrifyingly beautiful, and verging on the ecstatic in its glimpse of great turbulence just beneath the surface. Rhythmically Bidart possesses an astute sense of the music of speech, both on the page and in the earproving again Frost s assertion that a dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. In the process Bidart forges a unique and uniquely American voice that combines,...

On Louise Gluck features essays by leading critics, poets, and scholars that explore the work of recent U.S. poet laureate Louise Gluck.

Gluck, author of nine books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris, is noted for her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae. Though compared to world-famous verse by Sappho and Dickinson, Gluck's poetry has remained curiously undigested among readers of contemporary poetry for some time. On Louise Gluck gathers for the first time a diverse array of essays by the leading critics of this preeminent...

Hayden Carruth survived isolation, mental health problems, and long struggle with drink and smoke to produce a vision of modern poetry rooted in the New England tradition but entirely his own. Many feel his best poems emerged from the isolation of rural Vermont, and his poems often are concerned with rural images and metaphors reflecting the land and hardscrabble people around him. Together with his second love, jazz, Carruth's rural experiences infuse his poems with engaging and provocative ideas even as they present sometimes stark topics.

This volume collects essays and poems...

Alicia Ostriker as a poet is concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy. Everywoman Her Own Theology engages Ostriker's poetry from throughout her career. Her poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.

Of Angie Estes, the poet and critic Steph Burt has written that she ""has created some of the most beautiful verbal objects in the world."" In The Allure of Grammar, Doug Rutledge gathers insightful responses to the full range of Estes's work that approach these beautiful verbal objects with both intellectual rigour and genuine awe.

Though she published only five volumes of poetry over the course of her career, Jane Cooper (1924-2007) was deeply admired by her contemporaries. In Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention, Martha Collins and Celia Bland bring together several decades' worth of essential writing on Cooper's poetry.

A collection of essays, reviews, and interviews that is designed to ignite a more wide-ranging critical appraisal of Donald Revell's writing, from his fourteen collections of poems to his acclaimed translations of French symbolist and modernist poets to his artfully constructed literary criticism.