Willard Spiegleman is Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and Editor-in-Chief of The Southwest Review.

Spiegelman's masterly study of the persistence of the descriptive impulse in contemporary poetry, ranging from Tomlinson's just looking (the play on words is Tomlinson's) to Graham's ongoing search for a new way of looking, demonstrated how resourceful poets of various stripes engage themselves and the reader in inventive acts of looking at the visible world. Spiegelman has served his poets, and the art of poetry, well.

• 1: "The Way Things Look Each Day": Poetry, Description, Nature 2: "Just Looking": Charles Tomlinson and the "Labour of Observation" 3: What to Make of an Augmented Thing: Amy Clampitt's Syntactic Dramas 4: Charles Wright and the "Metaphysics of the Quotidian" 5: "A Space for Boundless Revery": Varieties of Ekphrastic Experience 6: John Ashbery's Haunted Landscapes 7: Jorie Graham's "New Way of Looking"

Willard Spiegleman is Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and Editor-in-Chief of The Southwest Review.

Spiegelman's masterly study of the persistence of the descriptive impulse in contemporary poetry, ranging from Tomlinson's just looking (the play on words is Tomlinson's) to Graham's ongoing search for a new way of looking, demonstrated how resourceful poets of various stripes engage themselves and the reader in inventive acts of looking at the visible world. Spiegelman has served his poets, and the art of poetry, well.

• 1: "The Way Things Look Each Day": Poetry, Description, Nature 2: "Just Looking": Charles Tomlinson and the "Labour of Observation" 3: What to Make of an Augmented Thing: Amy Clampitt's Syntactic Dramas 4: Charles Wright and the "Metaphysics of the Quotidian" 5: "A Space for Boundless Revery": Varieties of Ekphrastic Experience 6: John Ashbery's Haunted Landscapes 7: Jorie Graham's "New Way of Looking"