Phoenix Poets – serie

First Walk after Cancer. New ugly house (too big) with girl on porch cradling lacrosse stick; a Spanish lady, lost? Speaking Spanish to Bluetooth in her ear; tied rods of rebar webbing a bridge under repair; dude in red shorts, running-Hey, it's not that warm! no red wheelbarrow; white chick of seductive frame; ruined snow, wet street; sun meeting my face like a brother in a hospital room; laborers from China in hard hats and uniforms traversing embassy foundation, just a giant hole; Israeli grounds next door, cordoned off with cable, cameras at all corners; cops in car across the street, 7-Eleven coffee cooling on the hood; lost glove in bare tree; blue jay; my favorite shoes: green lights everywhere, seen, if not understood. At the heart of Joshua Weiner's new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet's point of view with Walt Whitman's to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC.For Weiner, Rock Creek is the location of myriad kinds of movement, streaming, and joining: personal enterprise and financial capital; national politics, murder, sex, and homelessness; the Civil War and collective history; music, spiritual awakening, personal memory, and pastoral vision. The questions that arise from the opening foundational poem inform the others in the collection, which range widely from the dramatic arrival of an uncanny charismatic totem that titles the volume to intimate reflections on family, illness, and dream visions. In "The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish", Weiner has discovered a new poetic idiom, one that is stripped down, rhythmically jagged, and comprehensively philosophical about human limits.

"Warhol/Electric Chair/'63": The red spreads like Christmas wrapping - the green, a field in a Caucasian rug. It's almost beautiful without the metal plates for the head (though the plug on the floor is visible). Before decorator colors & Hockney, Calvin Klein in the summery Hamptons, before there were - switches to break the flow my mother used to say never touch a radio when you're in the bathtub, never fly a kite near transmission lines. But still, it's furniture still, it's a typical American way to go - it's Sing Sing, the silhouette of Ethel Rosenberg. In the rheostatic air, the absent man heard "She Loves You", the British invasion and the flat line arrived at once. Outside Negroes were eaten by dogs. Johnson was sworn in. Cuba turned red in the green sea. In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed "June-tree", Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as his ongoing concerns with catastrophe and trauma, many of Balakian's new poems wrestle with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11.Whether reliving the building of the World Trade Towers in the inventive forty-three-section poem that anchors the book, walking the ruins of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, meditating on Andy Warhol's silk screens, or considering the confluence of music, language, and memory, Balakian continues his meditations on history, as well as on the harshness and beauty of contemporary life, that his readers have enjoyed over the years. In sensual, layered, and sometimes elliptical language, Balakian in "Ziggurat" explores absence, war, love, and art in a new age of American uncertainty.

Classic Blunder - After a noticeably happy day I sleep - and wake at dawn to a sudden sense of having erred. What have I done? I've made the classic blunder the blunder of living onward forwardly toward some disappointing future - what a fool - I should have lived not forwardly but sideways or circularly to stay in days like (what now has to be called) yesterday. Instead I've allowed the sun already to start pouring through the curtains the diminishments and inferiorities of a crude and unsentimental next day. To keep that train from leaving the station must call for some incredible level of concentration. In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries - both dire and hilarious - from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetnal frustration of our cravings for ego triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit.Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday's voice-driven poetry wants to find insight - or at least a stay against confusion - through personality without being trapped in personality. History will leave much of what we are on the threshing floor, Halliday notes, but in the meantime we do what we can: let posterity (if any) say we rambled truly.

Earth I didn't come here to make speeches. I didn't come here to make trouble. I didn't come here to be somebody's mother. I didn't come here to make friends. I didn't come here to teach. I didn't come here to drag the space heater from the house in summer with an extension cord out to the orchard because the peach trees we planted in a climate that couldn't take them didn't thrive, couldn't sweeten their fruit in a place like this. The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth - a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother's life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard.The visual focus of that sequence, a robin's nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called "Arguments," two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn't stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.

from Bagatelles Bagatelles, mere gestures in dry air, each pluck a dot, strokes marked on silence reaching into the dark. Beauty is strict, it passes: an echo, a wedge of harmony, sudden, broken - Who goes there? "An Algebra" is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts, emotions, and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation. Wholeness and brokenness intertwine in the book; glimpsed patterns and startling disjunctions drive its explorations. "An Algebra" is a work of changing equivalents, a search for balance in a world of transformation and loss. It is a brilliantly constructed, moving book by a poet who has achieved a new level of imaginative expression and skill.

The poems in Peg Boyers's Hard Bread are "spoken" in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life - her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese - much is invented. The result is a book by turns melancholy and acerbic, mournful and satiric, contemplative and combative.

"Pieta" - This time the migraine came with a vision bathed in night sweat: I was sitting on the Eames chair, your man's body on my lap, legs and arms white as casein draped over mine, spilling onto the cassock, new sores on your legs, dried blood on your feet and hands, from your chalk mouth the words forgive me, from mine, the impossible no. "Hard Bread", Peg Boyers' debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and its brilliant lyricism. In "Honey with Tobacco", Boyers' own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet's Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son, a postmodern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative.In familiar tableaux drawn from the Bible that have inspired great works of art - the "Annunciation", the "Pieta", and "Judgment Day" - Boyers explores what it means in contemporary America to be "blessed among women" and whether and how art can contain grief. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers' determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.

Letter from Ohio. The green so green it must be chemical. Faint drift of charcoal smoke. Rock radio. The pink azaleas thrusting at the blue. And all the same desires come crashing back: incredible X-ed out scenes and afterward the whoosh of traffic surf, our bodies bathed in the whole sweep of towers and freeways and meadows of blanket flowers. I want it all: heat puddle in the chest, moments like handfuls of honeycomb, split, dribbling...Enough. We've lived apart for weeks now and your voice cracks from the cell reception, hums and dips and breaks for seconds, as evening peaks to orange in the sycamores, and the need to see you stretches into the days that follow: stray lifetime spent in office rooms and parks and station halls as they fall to the curve of earth, the ocean. In El Dorado, Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and turning his high-res lens on everything from box stores to trout streams to airport lounges, Campion renders both personal and collective experience with capacious and subtle skill.

Poem to Fire: Fast transparency that explodes the fuel and air in the cylinder and shuts the intake valves and thrusts down on the piston so the crankshaft spins and spins you can through all material that blocks your way so fast that driving now past rushes and billboards this pull to her could be your own impersonal presence cloaked in the day to day of the malls and condos all those wired sensors keeping on guard for you except you flicker even inside the wet wall where papillary muscle makes that sweet pulsation in whatever room she's moving through this moment under the cotton and the cool smoothness tinted blue In this debut collection, Peter Campion explores both the gaps and the connections between the self and others. Like the "night blooming jasmine leaving its warm trace," these poems arise out of the dark. A man awakens in a hotel room to find the neighboring voices merging with the anguished souls of his nightmare. A woman living alone beside the ocean hears the words of the dead echo in the crashing waves. But if these poems convey a feeling of an enduring emptiness, they also offer us the most vital intimacies.In one poem, two lovers traverse the industrial sweep of strip malls and office towers to arrive at their rendezvous. In another, the seemingly simple memory of a mother playing with her sons at a park bridges a chasm of pain and loss. With great poise, keen insight, and formal skill, Campion moves between shared experience and interior life in the shifting textures of "Other People." Whether writing in rhymed couplets or free verse, he matches a deep understanding of the poetic tradition with his own imaginative feel for structure.

In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge 'to carve a space' for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara (who makes a startling appearance in the title poem), then in the next of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In "The Lions", Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

"With my eyes closed, I might have guessed a collaboration between William Empson and Noel Coward. But of course no one could have made up Turner Cassity but himself. The man is a wizard. In these new poems, each as clear and mysterious as crystal, he has conjured all sorts of miniature wonders and nasty home truths. It is the devil's own sorcery—and pure enchantment."—J. D. McClatchy

The evening beyond each chain-lit match seemed to crouch in the shapes of houses, then rose to play havoc in a veil of dogwoods. In among the lapses, deer stooped on their stilts to eat the tulips which, under these circumstances, turned away from the source like moths losing themselves in folded wool. Are we alone? If so, Particle and Wave insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements-a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry-unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, personal, and existential. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, Particle and Wave is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear. From the most recent housing bust, to the artistic visions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, to the labors of the Curies, to Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption of Vesuvius, culture and world histories are recontextualized through the lens of personal experience. Muscular, precise, structurally varied, and imagistic, these poems engage in lyricism yet resist mere confession.In doing so they project the self as a composite, speaking in a variety of registers, from the nursery rhyme songster, to the ascetic devotee, to the unapologetic sensualist. They welcome all comers and elbow the bounded physical world to make way for a dynamic, new subjectivity.

Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid-hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of personal, familial or national significance, "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography. With poise and skill, Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind of not just one individual but of an entire social world through a beautifully constructed poetic voice that issues from a kind of mythic childhood of our collective, tortured humanity. This sophisticated debut collection offers, deceptively simple poems that evoke highly complex states of mind with a voice that has long been listening to the discordant music of contemporary life.

The poems in The Weave Room reveal the life of a textile mill as it weathers a decisive social and human moment. Whether speaking in the voice of a weaver trying to quell a crowd about to turn violent over unionization or in his own voice as one of the mill's employees, Chitwood brings together many social and historical threads to show the pattern of a people and a place that has received little treatment in American poetry.

"Counter-Amores I.2". "Proof". Than brandished fire yet will I prove more strong - I burn unshaken, burn and die day-long. The hooked fish, torn, must learn to slip the bait Teasing the hook let go before too late. Not with you, but against you, love, I bruise My mouth, manage myself such pain I choose. I will this torment as I can't will love From you or me - what can a body prove? Though neither yours nor love's, still I'm a slave. Unite me from myself - I'm yours to have. Jennifer Clarvoe's second book, "Counter-Amores", wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid's "Amores", and, in talking back, take charge, take delight, and take revenge. They suggest that we discover what we love by fighting, by bringing our angry, hungry, imperfect selves into the battle. Like a man who shouts for the echo back from a cliff, or the scientist who teaches her parrot to say, "I love you," or the philosopher who wonders what it is like to be a bat, or Temple Grandin's lucid imaginings of the last moments of cattle destined for slaughter, the speakers in these poems seek to find themselves in relation to an ever-widening circle of unknowable others.Yearning for "the sweet cool hum of fridge and fluorescent that sang 'home,'" we're as likely to find "fifty-seven clicks and flickering channels pitched to the galaxy." Song itself becomes a site for gorgeous struggle, just as bella means both "beautiful" and "wars."

Wherever My Dead Go When I'm Not Remembering Them. Not gone, not here, a fern trace in the stone of living tissue it can somehow flourish from; or the dried up channel and the absent current; or maybe it's like a subway passenger on a platform in a dim lit station late at night between trains, after the trains have stopped - ahead only the faintest rumbling of the last one disappearing, and behind the dark you're looking down for any hint of light-where is it? why won't it come? you wandering now along the yellow line, restless, not knowing who you are, or even where until you see it, there it is, approaching, and you hurry to the spot you don't know how you know is marked for you, and you alone, as the door slides open into your being once again my father, my sister or brother, as if nothing's changed, as if to be known were the destination. Where are we going? What are we doing here? you don't ask, you don't notice the blur of stations we're racing past, the others out there watching in the dim light, baffled, who for a moment thought the train was theirs.Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro's twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the cosmos itself. In language richly nuanced yet accessible, these poems inhabit and explore fundamental questions of existence, such as time, mortality, consciousness, and matter. Shapiro brings his humor, imaginative intensity, characteristic syntactical energy, and generous heart to bear on life's ultimate mysteries. In ways few poets have done, he writes from a premodern, primal sense of wonder about our postmodern world.

The Neighbor is a book of portraits and portraiture. Like the eccentric and mysteriously heroic citizens of E. A. Robinson's Tilbury Town, Collier's figures haunt a startlingly familiar neighborhood. In clear, rich language, Collier reveals the complexities that emerge from his characters' seemingly uneventful lives.

Prayer to a Suicide - Brother, when they laid you down I touched the break in lashes where the chicken pox had blown the lid up long ago, small brushes that stroked out your seeing hours. I wish the clouds would wash us down with unrepentant power, that pounding rain would soak in to your newly opened grave. Our mother's breath is broken, her C scar tingles after many years. Our father has not spoken. All night the faucet drives hard tears down into the silent house. They say it is beyond repair. Wherever you are, cry for us. At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge - the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the laminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations. Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches "like fish."By turns humorous and pained, direct and mysterious, elegiac and elegant, the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirit toward and through its "perennial fall" - both the season and the human condition. Cumulatively, the work moves toward a fragile transcendence, surrendering to difficulty, splendor, and strangeness.

The poems in this, W. S. Di Piero's fifth collection of poetry, are animated by an ancient vision of the human state as existing somewhere between the divine and the bestial; tense with the compulsion toward formal order and the wild yearning after chaos, these are tough poems, gritty and relentless; they indulge neither the reader nor the poet. Their austere lyricism expresses Di Piero's desire for transcendent meaning, and their unflinching attention to natural and cultural history reflects an equally strong instinct for the earthbound.

A smudge of cloud on the horizon, then the pale city halo in the night sky. Quiet on the water-in the bare trees, tinsel rain. A bright, silent wheel turns on the bayside where the secret flag is raised at midnight. Skiffs push off from docks in the fair harbor. I don't want to hear, Again, Are you tired? That's why I bought the boat. Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time. The details on which Clary chooses to focus suggest a narrative that will not resolve. The unnamed people with whom she interacts offer exchanges she is desperate to prolong, and in attempts to understand her place, she reaches beneath the fragile armor of those loved, especially those who can no longer answer her. This quietly haunting book, remarkable for its subtlety and delicacy, is Clary's strongest, most engaging work to date and amply shows her to be a master of this lyric genre.

Rialto Invisible in this cheap night scene of the familiar bridge the lives - the lies - we lived on both sides of the canal, invisible the water's stench at low tide, the rotting debris beneath the picture-perfect surface, invisible the adjacent market still smelling of fish and ammonia, its slime of scales adorning the ground, invisible, too, in this souvenir print, the inevitable rat crouched under the pilaster, his throat quivering benignly in the moonlight, the silvery glow a local specialty: filth disguised as ornament. To Forget Venice is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyers's newest collection of poems. The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more frequently than any other, the city of Venice is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this varied and unconventionally polyphonic work.The voices we hear in these poems belong not only to characters like the mother of Tadzio (think Death in Venice), or the companion of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife, Effie, but also to wall moss, and sand, and - most especially - an authorial speaker who in 1965, at age thirteen, landed in Venice and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there. Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the author's desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.

Milton's God Where 1-95 meets The Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered - stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge, the onlooker couldn't decide until the end, or even then, what was revealed and what had been hidden. Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug's Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes-natural and domestic, political and religious - across America's East and Midwest. The book's title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil's Aeneid). Unique among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: "To stand sometime / outside my faith...or keep waiting / to be claimed in it."Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of "what it is to feel: / moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose."

From Ozone Journal. Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette, we lounged under the greenhouse - sky, the UVBs hacking at the acids and oxides and then I could hear the difference between an oboe and a bassoon at the river's edge under cover-trees breathed in our respiration; there was something on the other side of the river, something both of us were itching toward - radical bonds were broken, history became science. We were never the same. The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others-the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS-creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico.In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.

Midsummer Cambridge, MA, 2008 Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment. A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts, A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go: The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattened-honey not for babes. All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence. Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil. On your fingers, the residue of red pistils. What have you made? What have you kept alive? Green, a secret, occult, Grass veining the hands. Someone's baby toddling. And the phlox white. For now. Midsummer. A remarkable first book, Disorder tells the story, by turns poignant and outrageous, of a family's dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years.In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes readers on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Uganda, from England to Massachusetts and North Carolina, tracing the path of familial love, obsession, and the passage of time as filtered through the perceptions of family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, amorous vicars, and a dubious polygamist. We experience throughout a speaker forged by a deep awareness of intergenerational, multicontinental consciousness. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries in ways that few books of poetry do, Disorder bristles with quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence.

What I wanted was a goshawk on my wrist, A docile bit of wilderness in my care. Her setting-sun red eye returned my stare. Inside the cage I am a nurse, waiter, And janitor. Outside, an austringer. I searched for one all day in the forest. Now Chiefly poet. Now Shakes. Now sing. Now rare. I searched for one all day in the forest So I could cross the bird off my life-list. At the Center I fed her as you hold this Poem - at a reading distance. The flared Warning of her red eyes refuted my stare: You will never cross me off your life-list. Now Chiefly poet. Now Shakes. Now sing. Now rare. You wanted a little bit of wilderness Held docile on your wrist. What could be tamer Than extinct? At the trail head, the profiled picture. If you see this bird, call our 800 number. Because except what you allow me there Is no wilderness, there is no wilderness. Now Chiefly poet. Now Shakes. Now sing. Now rare. "Raptor" is a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its investigation of our poetic, mythic, and scientific fascination with birds of prey: hawks, eagles, owls, vultures, and falcons.Drawing on his own experience working at a raptor rehabilitation center, along with sources ranging from medieval texts on falconry to the latest conservation studies of raptor anatomy and habitat, Andrew Feld shows these killing birds to be mirrors for humanity and highly charged figures for the intersection of that which we call "wild" and that which we think of as domesticated - and how these opposed terms apply to the imperiled natural world, human social relations, and our most private, interior selves. In these poems, Feld does not shy away from either the damaging world or "the new, more comprehensive view / damage affords" in its aftermath.

In poems whose subjects range from theme parks to late-night radio, the aftermath of the Holocaust to television, The Life and Letters represents a celebrated poet-scholar at the height of his art.

"David Ferry must have had something up his sleeve when he called his book "Strangers," because his is a poetry of intimacy and familiarity. More than that, Mr. Ferry's short, sparse lyrics are as perfectly and simply composed as Japanese haiku—a rare accomplishment in poetry written in English."—Andy Brumer, New York Times Book Review"Strangers is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way."—Boston Globe"The poems of David Ferry's Strangers are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is the same austere and poignant voice throughout, asking the unanswerable things, speaking of all that is withheld from us, confronting the unknownness that dwells even in the familiar and dear. Painful and touching, the book offers a distinctive vision which is at the same time inescapably true."—Richard Wilbur

Hailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place."David Ferry's Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."—Frank Bidart"Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."—Boston Review