In "The Landscape Deeper In," author and poet William Bridges has gathered 30 years of poetry into his first general collection. Widely published in magazines and chapbooks, Bridges's work has drawn praise for its keen visual observation and breadth of subject matter, from domestic life ("Quarreling Through the Louvre") to meditations on art, travel, and history. The poems also cover a wide geographical range, from Taiwan to Peru to the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda. Another poet, Mike O'Connor, calls them "beautifully crafted, of unerring music and grace of line." He adds, "When I...

In his second memoir, "Five-Mountain Morning," teacher and writer William Bridges describes a life that has stretched from the Army in postwar Germany to journalism around the world to archaeology on a remote island in the North Atlantic. This book follows "Under the Heaven Tree," a childhood memoir that a critic says "did what we all should do-not only recall our lost lives and loved ones from oblivion, but also see ourselves as links in a long chain of being that reaches dimly backward and brightly forward." In "Five-Mountain Morning," Bridges writes about lost loves, marriage and children,...

In "A Fine Smirr of Rain," poet and essayist William Bridges explores life and the natural world through the lens of rain. Starting from the question "How long has it been raining?" he describes the world's oldest rock and its evidence of water 4.4 billion years ago. From the sound, shape, and smell of rain, he moves on to "Death by Umbrella" -the rain-related assassinations of a Napoleonic finance minister and (possibly) JFK. Before the book ends, Bridges has touched on rain in literature, Earth's wettest and driest spots, the destruction of rain forests, global warming, and ice-coring in...

In PLACES & STORIES, Bill Bridges turns his poet's/journalist's eye on scenes ranging from Venice to Machu Picchu to the Time Out Bar in Van Buren, Indiana. He also ranges in time, describing his search for echoes of the Yukon gold rush and for "lost villages and ghost towns" in rural Indiana. And the short stories at the back of the book end with a slightly eerie futuristic twist.

"A Weird Unfathomable Ordinary Everyday Life" is the lively and colorful record of a three-year correspondence between Bill Bridges, a professional writer and poet, and Dianne Jenkins, a mail- and rubber-stamp artist. Bill and Dianne live in Indiana and Massachusetts, respectively. They are correspondents in an almost 19th century sense-although they know about (and even use) computers and the telephone, this book was produced without a single e-mail or phone call. The result is illustrated with more than 100 pieces of Dianne's art (and a few of Bill's, who had to try his hand occasionally)....

In "Breath & Other Ventures," Bill Bridges has created a companion piece to his earlier "Places & Stories." But this time there's a more personal note, as he recounts how he dealt with an inherited respiratory ailment while at the same time exploring Zen breathing meditation. The "other ventures" of the title include a memoir constructed from notebooks of the 1970s, the story of a summer as a Washington newsman, an essay on "forgotten writers," and another GeeGee Dapple detective story, about a retired British editor who solves crimes through astute journalistic observation.

The business world is constantly transforming. When restructures, mergers, bankruptcies, and layoffs hit the workplace, employees and managers naturally find the resulting situational shifts to be challenging. But the psychological transitions that accompany them are even more stressful. Organizational transitions affect people; it is always people, rather than a company, who have to embrace a new situation and carry out the corresponding change.

As veteran business consultant William Bridges explains, transition is successful when employees have a purpose, a plan, and a part to play....