"When history proves useless and consensus chimerical," Donald Revell has written, "the poet's necessity is invention, and this does a lot to explain our century's preference for revision over mimesis." For Revell, The disruptions of this century have destroyed old illusions of historical continuity: "The consolations of history are furtive, / then fugitive, then forgotten." Invoking such contemporary events as the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, he seeks to integrate the political with the personal in a search for new paradigms of value and honor.

The poems in Brenda Hillman's new collection, a companion volume to her recent Death Tratates, offer a dynamic vision of a universe founded on the tensions between light and dark, existence and non-existence, male and female, spirit and matter. Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.

This volume represents, under one cover, the major work of the man whom critics and readers have designated the authentic poet of his American generation. For this collection, James Dickey has selected from his four published books all those poems that reflect his truest interests and his growth as an artist. He has added more than a score of new poems - in effect, a new book in themselves - that have not previously been published in volume form.

Specifically, Poems 1957-1967 contains 15 of the 24 poems that were included in his first book, Into the Stone (1960); 25 of the 36 that made up...