Yves Bonnefoy was one of the greatest living voices of contemporary French poetry. In this, his sixth book published by Seagull Books, he explores in profound new ways the mysteries of human consciousness. Readers find snatches of conversations--overheard, dropped without any possible conclusion--each pregnant with half-hidden, half-visible meaning. Limpid, punctuated with silences, the poems of Ursa Major are like stones picked up, turned over and set back down on the edge of life.

"Countless voices traverse us; endless, almost, as the meanders of dreams or the starry...