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Ben Belitt writes, "e;This volume-my fifth-extends and deepens a preoccupation I have had with the visible and invisible manifestations of people, places, and things. It offers a variety of poems of formal and textural density and, in addition, a system of 'doublings' and 'solitudes' whose oppositions express the drama of reality and appearance."e;Originally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York CityScaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Elena Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories-and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.

"e;The poems are elegies for everything, including myself,"e; writes James Richardson. "e;Beyond this, I cannot pretend to be certain of much about them. I suppose they reflect a self with only a tenuous grip on its surroundings, threatened by their (and its own) continuous vanishing. The poems respond with a helplessness, fitful control, and not a little tenderness. Like the protagonists of The Encyclopedia of Stones: A Pastoral, I am very slow, both unsettled and inspired by the vertiginous strangeness and speed of events. I suspect these melancholy and disembodied poems are attempts to arrest the moment long enough to say farewell, to let things go rather than be subject to their disappearance."e;Originally published in 1977.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"e;The first thing I recognize as the beginning of a poem,"e; writes Richard Pevear, "e;is a distinct rhythm, not only of stress but of movement. Once I hear it, I can find words for it. But the essential thing, finally, is simultaneity-the completion of a shape, a thought, an emotion, a figure, all at the same time. The Trojan War, the figures of Greek tragedy, certain elements of the Gospels, the stories of Malory, are parts of my personal language."e;Originally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"e;Every poet has one or two compulsive themes,"e; writes Leonard Nathan. "e;One of mine is how to make things fit together that don't but should; the other is getting down far enough below a surface to see if something is still worth praising. Over the years and without self-consciously trying. I have moved closer and closer to the human voice in my verse. But I have also tried to keep a quality in it-for lack of a better word, I call it eloquence-that makes it more than conversation. My hope is to be clear, true, and good listening."e;Originally published in 1975.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Writing about poetry Diana O Hehir says, "e;I think of poetry as harnessed energy-as a marvelous way of taking the chaotic emotion, the turbulent perception, and recreating them as images that are specific, definite, directed. Miraculously, when this process works, it's one of expansion rather than diminution; the fortunate poet can reach out beyond the walls of separate personality into a general air that everyone breathes. I think of my own poetry as intense, imagistic, surreal, and personal, and try to write about perceptions which have pushed me toward change or renewal."e; For the last six years Diana O Hehir has been writing poetry and has had poems published in Antaeus, Kayak, Poetry Northwest, and Southern Poetry Review.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and historyIn her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "e;ruined elegance."e; Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "e;I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches."e; There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertesz, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "e;a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience,"e; Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "e;ruins"e; and "e;elegance,"e; and how the experience of both defies judgment.

This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "e;plain American that cats and dogs can read,"e; as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wislawa Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "e;find one true feeling and hang on,"e; The Two Yvonnes overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force. Moving from 1960s Long Island, to 1980s Houston, to today's Brooklyn, the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen. One tells the story of young lovers "e;warmed by the rays / Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts,"e; while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter, where the giraffes pad about "e;like nurses walking quietly / outside a sick room."e; Another poem defines the speaker via a "e;packing slip"e; of her parts--"e;brown eyes, brown hair, from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia."e; The title poem, in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other, unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection.______ From The Two Yvonnes:WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOT SICK Jessica Greenbaum ? Her cries impersonated all the world;The fountain's bubbling speech was just a trickBut still I turned and looked, as she implored,Or leaned toward muffled noises through the bricks:Just radio, whose waves might be her wav-ering, whose pitch might be her quavering,I turned toward, where, the sirens might be "e;Save Me,"e; "e;Help me,"e; "e;Mommy, Mommy"e;--everythingShe, too, had said, since sloughing off the world.She took to bed, and now her voice stays fusedTo air like outlines of a bygone girl;The streets, the lake, the room--just places bruisedWithout her form, the way your sheets still holdRough echoes of the risen sleeper, cold.

Describing this collection of his poems, John Allman writes, "e;It is a book about the inner and outer worlds, a collection of multiple voices and relationships. In one sense it is about suffering, family, and survival. However, it is also about a world beyond such things, where identity burns by itself, where the self-changes but never dies. The book says that only change happens, but that survival without will and compassion is meaningless. The title, taken from a line in one of the book's ritual lyrics, suggests the four dimensions of human consciousness and effort, and the book strives to name or embody as many landscapes as possible-though it is the 'vertical' one given to religion and death that remains an abiding puzzle."e;Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This is an eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a "e;snappy, entertaining book."e; A triumphant follow-up to that acclaimed debut, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore "e;a new and exciting voice in American poetry."e; Jollimore is a professional philosopher, and in witty and profound ways his formally playful poems dramatize philosophical subjects--especially the individual's relation to the larger world, and the permeable, constantly shifting border between "e;inner"e; and "e;outer."e; For instance, the speaker of "e;The Solipsist,"e; suspecting that the entire world "e;lives inside of your skull,"e; wonders "e;why / God would make ear and eye / to face outward, not in."e; And Tom Thomson--a character who also appeared in Jollimore's first book--finds himself journeying like an astronaut through the far reaches of the space that fills his head, an experience that prompts him to ask that a doorbell be installed "e;on the inside,"e; so that he can warn the world before "e;intruding on't."e;______ From At Lake Scugog:LOBSTERS Troy Jollimore ? tend to cluster in prime numbers, sub-oceanic bundles of bug consciousnesssubmerged in waking slumber, plunged in pitsof murk-black water. They have coalesced out of the pitch and grime and salt suspendedwithin that atmospheric gloom. Their skinis colorless below. But when exposedto air, they start to radiate bright green, then, soon, a siren red that wails: I'm dead.The meat inside, though, is as white as teeth,or the hard-boiled egg that comes to mindwhen one cracks that crisp shell and digs beneath. Caress the toothy claw-edge of its pincerand you will know the single, simple thoughtthat populates its mind. The lobster trap is eleganceitself: one moving part: the thing that's caught.

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet's materials--words, objects, phenomena--are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed. Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Carnations reminds us that unremarkable places and events--a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a cafe--can, in a blink, be new. A short walk home is briefly transformed into a cathedral, and the work-worn body becomes a dancer, a prophet, a muse.______ From Carnations:THE PROPHETS Anthony Carelli ? A river. And if not the river nearby, then a dream of a river. Nothing happens that doesn't happen along a river, however humble the water may be. Take Rowan Creek, the trickle struggling to lug its mirroring across Poynette, wherein, suspended, so gentle and shallow, I learned to walk, bobbing at my father's knees. Later, whenever we tried to meander on our inner tubes, we'd get lodged on the bottom. Seth, remember, no matter how we'd kick and shove off, we'd just get lodged again? At most an afternoon would carry us a hundred feet toward the willows. We'd piss ourselves on purpose just to feel the spirits of our warmth haloing out. And once, two bald men on the footbridge, bowing in the sky, stared down at us without a word.

The "e;memorable"e; (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "e;impressive"e; (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetryAlmanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "e;clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve."e; By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.From Almanac:THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUMAustin SmithAmongst the masterpieces of the small-townPicassos and Van Goghs and photographsof the rural poor and busts of dead Greeksor the molds of busts donated by the ArtInstitute of Chicago to this dyingtown's little museum, there was a mummy,a real mummy, laid out in a dim-litroom by himself. I used to goto the museum just to visit him, a pharaohwho, expecting an afterlifeof beautiful virgins and infinite foodand all the riches and jewelshe'd enjoyed in earthly life,must have wondered how the hellhe'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois.And I used to go alone into that roomand stand beside his sarcophagus and say,"e;My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."e;

With skillful rhetoric and tempered lyricism, the poems in A Glossary of Chickens explore, in part, the struggle to understand the world through the symbolism of words. Like the hens of the title poem, Gary J. Whitehead's lyrics root around in the earth searching for sustenance, cluck rather than crow, and possess a humble majesty. Confronting subjects such as moral depravity, nature's indifference, aging, illness, death, the tenacity of spirit, and the possibility of joy, the poems in this collection are accessible and controlled, musical and meditative, imagistic and richly figurative. They are informed by history, literature, and a deep interest in the natural world, touching on a wide range of subjects, from the Civil War and whale ships, to animals and insects. Two poems present biblical narratives, the story of Lot's wife and an imagining of Noah in his old age. Other poems nod to favorite authors: one poem is in the voice of the character Babo, from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, while another is a kind of prequel to Emily Dickinson's "e;She rose to His Requirement."e; As inventive as they are observant, these memorable lyrics strive for revelation and provide their own revelations.

"e;How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea,"e; writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) "e;Mother's Sewing Box,"e; "e;For My Father Looking for My Uncle,"e; and "e;The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria."e; Finally, the poet's words again: "e;. . . you get / just what you want"e; and (just before that), "e;Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."e;--Marvin Bell

From Erosion:SAN SEPOLCRO Jorie Graham ? . . . . How cleanthe mind is,holy grave. It is this girlby Pierodella Francesca, unbuttoningher blue dress,her mantle of weather,to go intolabor. Come, we can go in.It is beforethe birth of god. No-onehas risen yetto the museums, to the assemblyline bodiesand wings to the open airmarket. This iswhat the living do: go in.It's a long way.And the dress keeps openingfrom eternityto privacy, quickening.Inside, at the heart,is tragedy, the present momentforever stillborn,but going in, each breathis a buttoncoming undone, something terriblynimble-fingeredfinding all of the stops. Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California.She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.

Chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to relaunch the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets under his editorship, The Eternal City revives Princeton's tradition of publishing some of today's best poetry. With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.______ From The Eternal City:WHAT I MEANT TO SAY Kathleen Graber ? In three weeks I will be gone. Already my suitcase standsoverloaded at the door. I've packed, unpacked, & repacked it,making it tell me again & again what it couldn't hold.Some days it's easy to see the signifi cant insignificanceof everything, but today I wept all morning over the swollen,optimistic heart of my mother's favorite newscaster,which suddenly blew itself to stillness. I have tried for weeksto predict the weather on the other side of the world: I don't wantto be wet or overheated. I've taken out The Complete Shakespeare to make room for a slicker. And I've changed my mind& put it back. Soon no one will know what I mean when I speak.Last month, after graduation, a student stopped me just outsidethe University gates despite a downpour. He wanted to tell methat he loved best James Schuyler's poem for Auden. So much to remember, he recited in the rain, as the shopsbegan to close their doors around us. I thought he would livea long time. He did not. Then, a car loaded with his friendspulled up honking & he hopped in. There was no chance to linger& talk. Today I slipped into the bag between two shoes that bookwhich begins with a father digging--even though my fatherwas no farmer & planted ever only one myrtle late in his life& sat in the yard all that summer watching it grow as he died,a green tank of oxygen suspirating behind him. If the suitcasewere any larger, no one could lift it. I'm going away for a long time,but it may not be forever. There are tragedies I haven't read.Kyle, bundle up. You're right. It's hard to say simply what is true. For Kyle Booten ?

Explanation of America.