These poems remind us that we are all in the thick of things, the rich and complicated givens. Moving fluently from subjects as diverse as the surface of Europa to a tiny spider in a tear of wallpaper, from Pythagoras at Tyre to the wings of a dragonfly, they are in love with the world and the deep seriousness of living. Often lavish themselves, they reflect that fact that the author is a visual artist as well as a poet of insightful and sustained imagination.

On becoming familiar with difference equations and their close re- lation to differential equations, I was in hopes that the theory of difference equations could be brought completely abreast with that for ordinary differential equations. HUGH L. TURRITTIN, My Mathematical Expectations, Springer Lecture Notes 312 (page 10), 1973] A major task of mathematics today is to harmonize the continuous and the discrete, to include them in one comprehensive mathematics, and to eliminate obscurity from both. E. T. BELL, Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, New York (page 13/14), 1937] The theory of...

Poetry. "Allan Peterson, in PRECARIOUS, his fifth full-length collection of poems, refuses the easy path of a consoling clarity, opting instead for a difficulty that more accurately reveals the blurred perspective of one human being's singular fixity from his place in Nature. What there is to see or know shifts, hardens into focus, then flies away into the collapsing moment when the eye misperceives or the mind suddenly remembers or misremembers... or comes to rest on a centering image or idea. It is challenging poetry and yet there isn't a trace of cynicism in this work. Like a modern day...