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Jerome Rothenberg holds a premier place in the American avant-garde. The poems in Seedings, his newest collection, leap across history. Past and future become entwined, and the intricate paths reaching from one century and one millennium into another double back into timelessness ("as the twentieth century winds down/the nineteenth century begins/again"). The long title poem that opens this fin-de-siecle gathering is, appropriately, a celebration of poets and friends--such as Robert Duncan, George Oppen, and Paul Blackburn--who have entered what Rothenberg calls "a Paradise of Poets." "Seedings" is followed by four other sections, "Improvisations" is a series of high-energy poems in a mode of open writing characteristic of much of the poet's experimental work, while "Twentieth Century Unlimited" is an assemblage of travel poems and personal observations. "An Oracle for Delfi" revisits and sees anew a classical landscape long the inheritance of Western poets. A final sequence, "14 Stations," joins the concise verbal techniques of gematria (traditional Hebrew numerology) with the stark agonies of the Holocaust last explored by Rothenberg in Khurbn & Other Poems (1989).

Michael Palmer's new collection is structured in two parts, "What I Did Not Say" and "Thread," subtitled "Stanzas in Counterlight." It begins with a beautiful suite of poems featuring The Master of Shadows (first glimpsed in his 2006 collection The Company of Moths). The counterlight of the title section shines in shafts of Palmer's ever-surprising ironic wit, which is given to sidelong parallel leaps. Several poems in Thread directly address our endless wars, yet even in sorrow and rage the poems still glow with wonder. In multiphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are grounded in the central rootedness of the whole history of poetry and culture that has gone before. In his new poems, signature palimpsests create complex cycles of thought, "returning and returning" via echoes to what he has called "the layering process, the process of accretion and the process of emergence."      Say / that whatever comes / goes. / /      The Shadow knows / nothing / such / /      His calling. / Round his / listing / /      House / the bindweed / grows.