Fog at the Manassas Battlefield

In some ways this volume is my collected poems if "collected" poems are a product not of the poet's age and health but of the age of the poems in the book. Among the poems that appear in this book, for instance, "Manassas" is the oldest, written nearly fifty years ago, shortly after I took a teaching job at Northern Virginia Community College in Manassas, a campus adjacent to the Manassas Battlefield Park. "Manassas," won the Four Quarters Poetry Prize from LaSalle University in 1978. I remarked then, formally and informally, on what I have repeated often over the past half century, my belief that poetry has potential to stand for a great many things in our culture, including our evolving understandings of the world. And maybe it does.