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The speaker of The Philosopher's Window and Other Poems, Allen Grossman tells us, is "an old man compelled by the insistent questioning of the children to explain himself"-and in this way, the world. He begins with creation ("The Great Work Farm Elegy"), recalls the romantic quest of youth ("The Philosopher's Window"), returns to reality ("The Snowfall" and "Whoever Builds"). His tales told, the old man wakes in a stormy springtime ("June, June"), "when the lilacs are gone." Grossman's allegory of life's journey, at once sonorous and antic, takes in the high and the low in these new visionary songs of innocence and experience.Allen Grossman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He counts among his many honors and awards MacArthur, Guggenheim, and NEA fellowships, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, and the PEN-Sheaffer/New England Award for Literary Distinction. The Philosopher's Window is his eighth book of poetry. His previous collection, The Ether Dome & Other Poems New and Selected (1991), was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee.

The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials, establish a dialogue with silence. Breath, its syllables buried in the resonant space between the word and the void, unlocks "the gloriole, the ring of things released." Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems are not more nor less than a search in the redemptive, celebrating the regeneration of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials once again confirms the praise of Robert Duncan, who described Sobin's work as "a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarifies renewed."

When Caradoc Evans's novel Nothing to Pay appeared in 1930, it met with much admiration and also much resistance. His ruthless exposure of the Nonconformist establishment undermined the commonly held view that the Welsh were a pastoral, God-fearing people. As Jeremy Brooks put it The Independent, "What the Welsh could not forgive was that they recognized themselves only too clearly in Evans's satirical portraits." But Dylan Thomas praised Evans's work relentlessly, and H.G. Wells said in a lecture: "There was one, who is too little esteemed, who has done the thing [of telling about the trade shops] with a certain brutal thoroughness, and he tells a great deal of truth. That is Caradoc Evans in his book Nothing to Pay." (In America, H.L. Mencken saw in Evans the fundamentalists of the South laid bare, and offered one hundred free copies of his story collection to the local YMCA.) Nothing to Pay relates the story of Amos Morgan, an ambitious draper from Cardiganshire who works his way up to London through the shop trade. Largely autobiographical, this novel was admired by the Welsh literati and has since become a classic of Welsh literature, not only for its scathing satire, but for its brilliant linguistic inventiveness and poetic style.

The author describes his characters as people who, though they earn little money, are not quite working poor-nor can they work without working hard. They do not know quite how to betray or abandon each other.  Mostly, they try to love and do not readily shy from duty. Though Allman's narratives run from stark naturalism to the near magical and the out-and-out futuristic, his imagination holds to the everyday-as if to say to his readers: Yes, life is grim, but it is precisely the unbearable that becomes the ground for healing.

Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan's writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer. Included as well are "Rites of Participation, " an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The Homosexual in Society."

The running theme in Michael McClure's Simple Eyes & Other Poems is: looking at the world directly. The results are often as disquieting as they are illuminating, whether he directs his unblinking gaze on the American cityscape, the landscapes of Mexico and Kenya, or the mind's own terrain. In the long title poem, "Simple Eyes (Fields)," the stanzas on the Persian Gulf War bloom out of images of all wars the poet has known--"the spiritual wars, the napalm and cordite and nuclear wars, and the war against nature"--and become a kind of spiritual autobiography. At the heart of the poetry is McClure's return to the ancient concept of agnosia, the idea of knowing through unknowing, as a way of living in desperate times, in which deep human or humane feelings have almost become outlaw. Simple Eyes is an outspoken poet's statement, unsentimental, yet with mind and eye quickened by love.

The Father of a Murderer takes place in a classroom of the Wittelsbach Gymnasium in 1920s Munich over the course of a single Greek lesson. Headmaster Himmler (the father of Heinrich Himmler) enters the classroom, apparently to observe the students' progress. However, he soon takes over the lesson himself. Himmler mercilessly tests the boys, but his real purpose is to teach a political lesson to the German youths, and through them to settle scores with their fathers.

As poet and experimental translator, pioneer in performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg for over three decades has been a literary radical and prominent influence in the American avant-garde. Among his own earliest sources was the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whose "composition through images ... opened my mind to the contemporary poetry of Europe & of something possibly older & deeper that would surface for us in America as well." Having recently returned to translating Lorca, Rothenberg began to appropriate and rearrange items of Lorca's vocabulary and to compose a series of poems of his own that "both are & aren't mine, both are & aren't Lorca." As an original work, The Lorca Variations are, as he describes them, "a way of coming full circle into a discovery that began with Lorca & for which he has stood with certain others as a guide & constant fellow-traveler."

A Table of Green Fields includes ten stories, variously about the painter Henry Scott Tuke, the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, Kafka, Thoreau, along with some imaginary Frenchmen and Scandinavians, among others. Calculating the infinite in the finite, tracing geometries of desire, placing the obdurate world in an uncustomary light, each of these stories opens out its own world. Without giving up the plot or character of the traditional short story, Guy Davenport's inventions are complex events in which ideas and cultural history are a kind of music to which the characters dance. Despite the fractal, syncopated collage of his narrative style, Davenport's prose is objective, terse, and transparent. A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff's dying vision of "a table of green fields," probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to "he babbled of green fields," a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.

The stage-struck daughter of an English rural dean runs off with the family plate to London and a theatrical career-only to die tragically by the bite of a mousetrap in her moment of triumph as a sensational Juliet.

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevated his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war--Laughlin's muse spoke of all these things with a fresh directness that make his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin's efforts as publisher and poet had been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him was, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a "continuous present" in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin's cheeky doppelganger, Hiram Handspring.

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevated his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war--Laughlin's muse spoke of all these things with a fresh directness that make his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin's efforts as publisher and poet had been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him was, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a "continuous present" in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin's cheeky doppelganger, Hiram Handspring.

In her celebrated essay "Against Decoration," published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a "new formalism" that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are "humanist poems," written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell."

Unpredictable and uncanonical, Eliot Weinberger's essays are the "outside stories" of cultural migrations. The fifteen pieces collected here range from the history of the Salman Rushdie affair to the dream of Atlantis, from the turf wars among ethnographic filmmakers to the unlikely romance between poetry and espionage, from the pilgrims in Plymouth to the students in Tiananmen Square. Above all, Weinberger's concern is poetry--whether written in medieval Baghdad or by Mexicans in Japan--and the perennially underground yet global network through which it travels. With his modernist sensibility and internationalist perspective, Weinberger's inventive prose transports old myths and texts to the strange realities of contemporary life.

Gathered in The Man with the Heart in the Highlands are sixteen stories from William Saroyan's most celebrated literary period, culled from several long out-of-print collections from the 1930s and '40s, While achieving meteoric success with The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life, the young Saroyan set the pace with characters as fresh and compassionate as himself. His voice here is exhilarating, luminous, and completely distinctive--ready to let go with a lusty brash laugh on every page. These stories amply bear out Elizabeth Bowen's opinion that "probably since O. Henry nobody has done more to endear and stabilize the short story."

The Infinite Moment is a personal selection made by a poet known for his elegant translations from several languages, Chinese, Japanese, Estonian, Latin, and now ancient Greek. Drawing from the classic Lyra Graeca and The Greek Anthology, Sam Hamill has made new, American translations of poems in the thousand-year tradition that begins with Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anakreon in the 6th century C.E. The love poems, epigrams, and sly invective of over forty poets remind us once again of the deep wellspring of ancient Greece that nourished the roots of so many cultures.The Greek lyric poem was made to be performed with musical accompaniment, but like its modern descendent it seeks to articulate the experience of insight attained in the infinity of the moment. Says Hamill: "The fundamental experiences of humanity remain simultaneously universal and particular. The tears of Lymnos on the banks of the Akeron are the same tears Hitomaro shed a thousand years later on the shores of the Omi Sea."

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams presents, in matching format, the plays of one of America's most consistently influential and innovative dramatists. The first five volumes of this ongoing series contain Williams's full-length plays through 1975 and, in addition to the texts themselves, include original cast listings and production notes. Volumes 6 and 7 contain Williams's collected shorter plays. Now available as a paperback, Volume 8 adds to the series four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams's life.

The three sections of Bei Dao's affecting new book of poems, Old Snow--"Berlin," "Oslo," "Stockholm"--are poignant reminders of the restless and rootless life of the exile. All the poems in the present bilingual volume were written post-Tiananmen Square (June 4, 1989), and the poet refers back to this watershed both overtly ("Not your bodies but your souls/ shall share a common birthday') and in dense images of loss and betrayal ("old snow comes constantly, new snow comes not at all/ the art of creation is lost"). As renowned China scholar, Jonathan Spence commented on Bei Dao's earlier book, The August Sleepwalker: "The poet was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.'" Bonnie S. McDougall, whose translations of Bei Dao have been called "a major achievement in themselves," is Professor of Chinese at the University of Edinburgh. Working with Chinese writer in exile Chen Maiping (now residing in Oslo), she once again renders Bei Dao's poems into fluid and musical English.

Futility is an astounding, funny, and enchanting novel which mixes eccentric Russian sensibilities with eccentric British brains, both richly possessed by its author William Gerhardie (1895-1977). The novel's narrator, Andrei Andreiech, an Englishman of Russian upbringing, recounts his entanglements with the Bursanov family and his love for Nina, the second of three beautiful sisters. The Revolution destroys the family fortunes, but Nina's father still pins his hopes on his Northern goldmines, gathering dependents who trail him even to Siberia. Andrei also waits, hoping his love for Nina will bring happiness. It is Gerhardie's vivacity and lightness of tone in conducting these meaningful yet ludicrous tragedies of disappointment that marks Futility as one of the great neglected novels of the twentieth century.

Stitching Porcelain, Deborah Larsen's first book of poetry, is a narrative-lyric sequence based on the life of Matteo Ricci, the resourceful Jesuit who entered China in 1583 and stayed for a quarter century. Pondering cultural accommodation as well as faith, many of the poems center on actual events: Ricci's dressing as a Buddhist; his awe-inspiring map (with China shrewdly centered); his prostration before an empty Dragon Throne. Other events the poet imagined. (In the title room, Ricci addresses a love lyric to China: "Your porcelain is so fine, so thin,/a brass wire can repair it . . . /Once I saw you beneath the bamboo/ . . . bent back/from the world, stitching porcelain.") With a felicity rare in a debut volume, Larsen's opalescent poetry works in perfect counterpoint to the strange and brilliant Ricci.

Italian passion--"the passion that seeks its own satisfaction, and not to give one's neighbor an enhanced idea of oneself"--is the life-blood of Stendhal's Three Italian Chronicles. Gathered here are three long-out-of-print stories animated by life-and-death romances and sensational crimes. "The Cenci" and "The Abbess of Castro," set in a brazen Renaissance, are the author's versions of two antique chronicles he discovered in Italian libraries: "Vanina Vanini" is a Roman tale of the 1820s. All three give full rein to that special egoism of unswerving, passionate purpose Stendhal so adored in Napoleon and celebrated in all his heroes and heroines. Fused to that passion is his style, which imperturbably stage-manages urgent speech and violent intrigue. On this gemlike scale, his style as it charms and stings seems particularly vivid: for admirers of his novels, each of these stories gleams like an enameled miniature executed by a great master.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

Born in 1908, Niccolò Tucci is the author of six books (three in Italian; three, English). He first became known in America for his articles and stories published in various leading periodicals-among them Partisan Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. The Rain Came Last is the first collection of Tucci's English-language stories to be published.Mary McCarthy remarks in her introduction that the material Tucci delineates lies "somewhere between excruciated memory and 'happy' invention." He writes of his childhood and adolescence in the remote Tuscany countryside where his family lived, dislocated from its grand and opulent past. Later, in a different dislocation, Tucci's stories spring from his urbane and bohemian adult years in Manhattan, to which he emigrated in the 1930s. Very few other writers for whom English was not a native language have adopted and adapted it in so masterly and personal a fashion-Conrad and Nabokov among the rare exceptions. "He is," comments Mary McCarthy, "an international man, a very unusual thing, and it is that perhaps that has put and kept him in a class by himself."

In Yiddish, khurbn is the word for "total destruction," the word for what the English-speaking world calls the Jewish "Holocaust" of World War II. In 1987, thirteen years after the publication of his book of ancestral poems, Poland/1931, Jerome Rothenberg visited Poland and the small town of Ostrow-Mazowiecka, from which his parents had emigrated in 1920. "I hadn't realized," he writes, "that it was only fifteen miles from Treblinka..." Out of the poet's confrontation with his family's annihilation came Khurbn & Other Poems. "The poems that I first began to hear at Treblinka are the clearest message I have ever gotten about why I write poetry. They are an answer also to the proposition that poetry cannot or should not be written after Auschwitz." For decades a leader of the American literary avant-garde, Rothenberg, with Khurbn & Other Poems, adds his voice to those writers, like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes, who have sought to name the unnamable at the ruinous heart of the history of our time.