Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being.

Heather McHugh's companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of "stitches in hand and birds in time"; "We part/ before we...

'Jane Hirshfield's is a brave, new voice that, finding itself in its first volume, now goes on to ever more searching music. Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized.' - Theodore Weiss

Mark Irwin's boyhood near the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, haunts his poetry. This book of three elegies explores the nature of remembered time and space--personal, historical, geological--against the progression of time--evolution, germination, cell division, nuclear fission, the decay of memory and feeling. This, the poet says, is a kind of "fossil record" of science's impact on the modern world. Entropy (the tendency of atoms towards disorder) becomes a god, a blueprint for possibility. Disorder--frenzy, darkness, chaos--leads to evolution and evolution to order, harmony,...

Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets.

Winner of the Commonwealth Club Book Award, Silver Medal for Poetry (1990)

In the title poem "Fortress," the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world.

All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the...

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood--commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own--a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing "the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true."

Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted "in the faces of old regrets." But...

This is the first book published in English by of the work of Brazilian poet Adelia Prado. Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes....

Winner of the Pen Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry (1990)

New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality - adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as: If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the...

A book of new poems by a major writer is an event. A book of new poems that marks a different, more powerful approach is cause for celebration. "What I looked for here," James Dickey tells us about The Eagle's Mile, "was a flicker of light 'from another direction, ' and when I caught it - or thought I did - I followed where it went, for better or worse." In this new work, Dickey edges away from the narrative-based poems of his previous books and gives instead more primacy to the language in which he writes. His poetry gains flexibility, and his poetic power becomes even surer and more clearly...

Clear and insightful poetry on our relationship to the given world. "Mr. Tate is an elegant and anarchic clown. A lord of poetic misrule with a serious, subversive purpose."-John Ash, New York Times Book Review "Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. Tate's poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that is may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that...