This collection contains the first published and publicly appreciated poems of Elizabeth Socolow's life as a poet. They led up to her writing and winning the Barnard Poetry Prize in 1987 for Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton. Many of them are in the voice of known characters (persona poems)- Jocasta, Ophelia, Cleopatra-or addressed to famous figures such as Homer. These pieces move back and forth between a kind of easy, mostly celebratory address to friends, the "Summer Porches" of the title and the unfinished meditations on public characters or statues or situations. A...

The poems in this volume of many sections were written after award-winning poet Elizabeth Socolow left her home of twenty years in New Jersey and moved to Detroit and the itinerate life of an adjunct lecturer. The voices of the poems are taken over by a sense of the inner woman being somewhat unrecognizable, with a need to summon unknown skills and attitudes and invent new ways of being in the world. In the pressure of feeling "new," the poet remembers other, often forgotten selves. In the longest poem in this volume, she sees her grandfather as Prometheus, giving her not fire, but the...

In this volume, award-winning poet Elizabeth Socolow gives expression to the dislocation of a woman poet in her early forties-giving her sons to the world after having lost her marriage and its ready companionship of family life. In these poems the speaker often stands, startled, noticing some change in weather or emotion or expectation. They are especially internal and transitional, personal in that sense, but at the same time often outward-looking, a person used to sharing a life entering newly into conversation, like Emily Dickinson, with anything at all that comes to her in her world.