Poems Books

So fresh in his language and perceptions, so consistently profound, and so charming -- like James Schuyler or Gary Snyder, Creeley feels genuinely present in his poems: to have this volume on your shelf is to have him in the room with you. More people should know the gentle and inspiring presence of this wonderful teacher and writer. "It's all moved inside, / all that dear world // in mind for forever, / as long as one walks / and talks here, / thinking of you."

Bob Creeley was perhaps the original beatnik, a quiet man who turned himself outward and in so doing made a great impression upon the world with his work and his persona. We should all know more about him -- his best poems (of his many fine ones) should be with us always.

Creeley won me over early, in junior high, when my teacher at the time handed a well thumbed book of Mr. Creeley's poetry. From the first page I was caught up in a wonderful tangled world of poems constructed from small moments of happy introspection - given a kind of sincere reverence by Mr. Creeley's intense scrutiny of what even a small moment can mean; a drunken dinner, a ride in a Cadillac, a slice of apple pie topped with ice cream - these moments becomes a minor religious awakening in the hands of Robert Creeley. He is by far my favorite poet, likely because my own small epiphanies are so much like those he writes of.

This volume contains seven poems in Old English--Caedmon's Hymn, The Battle of Brunanburh, The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Deor. While clearly not a substitute for the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, this book has been edited well by Pope, and contains textual notes, commentary covering critical issues central to each of the poems, and perhaps most importantly, a glossary of the words in the poems. The New Edition (1981) also has a supplement listing editions of the poems that have come out since 1966 and some additional notes.

This book, edited and with commentary by John Pope, professor of English from Yale, is a good reader companion volume for someone who is studying Old English with a grammar in another volume, or someone who has already studied the rudiments of the language and wants practice with actual texts. These are seven of the better-known poems from Old English (if one makes the exception for Beowulf). As Pope states in his preface, these poems make a good introduction before one proceeds to the study of Beowulf.

The seven poems included here are Caedmon's Hymn (in both Northumbrian and Normalised Versions), The Battle of Brunanburh, The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Deor. These poems include classic themes from Old English (sea journeys, heroic tales, etc.), particularly edging toward Beowulf with the story in Deor.

The poems themselves make up a mere 40 pages of the text. The longest section is the commentary, with comprises nearly 100 pages in all. The commentaries develop the history and context of the poems, as well as a section on textual notes highlighting particular words or phrases of interest. This section also contains an essay on Old English versification, including discussion of areas of ambiguity and confusion based on the paucity of texts that have survived.

The glossary here, some 75 pages of the text, serves a dual role as a vocabulary builder as well as a means for learning the subtle variations in compound words. Various words and phrases throughout both the poems and the glossary have been 'normalised' for purposes of beginning students, but the parameters for this are explained in the preface.

The seven poems contained herein are not translated into Modern English, so let the reader be aware that this is meant for someone learning to translate or read Old English.

The commentary is engaging and clearly written (and includes later notes at the end in the new, 1981 edition); the poems themselves are interesting, and the glossary is very useful.

This is a good reader. It uses hard to fine Old English poems instead of word for word Latin translation which are useless. Old English grammer and latin are not at all the same. I tried using a reader that used an Old English translation of the Latin Bible and while it is good for learning words, the bad thing is you are learning Latin grammer instead of Old English grammer and word order. Old English is Germanic and the grammer is VERY Germanic. Watch out for ANY Old English proses for it is normally word for word Latin translated into Old English. This will really trip you up. Wyatt Kaldenberg

Book arrived in the late afternoon, I started reading and didn't get to bed till 10 AM the next morning. A stunning detective story.

This book introduced the revolutionary idea that an aristocrat named Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550- 1604), wrote the works of Shakespeare under a psuedonym. Oxford is now considered the leading candidate for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon largely because of the influence this book has had over a 75 year period. It first addresses the documentary evidence "against" Will Shakspere from Stratford as the author, then presents the positive evidence on behalf of Oxford as author. The evidence for Oxford is detailed and circumstantial: literary and intellectual parallels in the works of Oxford and Shakespeare; parallels in the life of Oxford, his family and friends and the plots of the Shakespeare plays; topical references in the plays that pre-date the time during which Shakespeare allegedly wrote the works; professional, political and historical knowledge displayed in the plays for which the Stratford actor could not have had the training or access; and so on. Exhaustive research; excellent organization of materials; superbly written. A book that academics have not been able to refute since its publication in 1920.

(And by the way, it's pronounced "Loney.") I can't add much to the other positive reviews of this ground-breaking book. Written well, convincing...long live the Earl of Oxford--"Though I once gone to all the world must die" indeed!!

Come on people! I--devotee of Whitman, Stevens, Hart Crane, Kenneth Fearing--have looked high and low for great living American poets. Jim Daniels is definitely one. Daniels is remarkably hard hitting, funny, empathetic. He writes about work, race, religion and family. But it is his craft--music and imagery--that separate him from the pack. This book, unlike most contemporary poetry books, will stay with you after you close the covers. So buy it.

Come on people! I--devotee of Whitman, Stevens, Hart Crane, Kenneth Fearing--have looked high and low for great living American poets. Jim Daniels is definitely one. Daniels is remarkably hard hitting, funny, empathetic. He writes about work, race, religion and family. But it is his craft--music and imagery--that separate him from the pack. This book, unlike most contemporary poetry books, will stay with you after you close the covers. So buy it.

I often cuss the current crop of poets. Many of them seem to be self-infatuated blowhards who are writing in some kind of inbred code that will allow them to congradulate each other on how wise they are. Unless you have an alphabet soup of degrees behind your name, as most of us don't, you can't grasp a blessed word being said.

Daniels, who worked in a Detroit auto plant to pay his way through graduate school, doesn't seem that way at all. His work, though deep, is accessible,and his use of language is down-to-earth. This is something I really admire in a poet-when he writes not to be studied, but to be read.

His inspiration comes from a myriad of sources. His troubled religious faith, his family, his years in the factory followed by years in academia, even the music of the J. Geils Band all provide fodder for him. This book is a synopsis of Daniels' poetic career, allowing us to see him at all phases of his artistic development, and it's all a pleasure to be seen.

The poems even have different structures. Some rhyme, some don't. Some, like "Time, Temperature," are long and meaty, while others, like "The Fall," are quick and concise. None of them slack, no matter what their length, and all are pleasing for a broad cross-section of the reading public to consume.

Despite his luminous c.v., Daniels is a poet of the people, a creator of work that cries out to be read. If you love poetry, grab this book quickly. Even if you don't love poetry, this book will be a worthy investment. Read it often and enjoy!

The Singers I Prefer is the debut collection of original free-verse poetry by Christian Barter, an emerging Maine poet who has been previously published in such journals as The Georgia Review, North American Review, and American Scholar. The brief, emotional verses paint a poignant and sometimes tragic picture of daily life and the struggle to persevere in the face of an uncertain future. A haunting, soft-spoken, sometimes bitterly insightful collection. "There Are No Stars Tonight but Those of Memory": Tonight the real stars seem / just memories // crowding the black above my house // still bright as any city / seen from a hill // where cities seem to be // the things we planned to build.

The Singers I Prefer is the debut collection of original free-verse poetry by Christian Barter, an emerging Maine poet who has been previously published in such journals as The Georgia Review, North American Review, and American Scholar. The brief, emotional verses paint a poignant and sometimes tragic picture of daily life and the struggle to persevere in the face of an uncertain future. A haunting, soft-spoken, sometimes bitterly insightful collection. "There Are No Stars Tonight but Those of Memory": Tonight the real stars seem / just memories // crowding the black above my house // still bright as any city / seen from a hill // where cities seem to be // the things we planned to build.

What Barter says in the poem "On a Beethoven Cello Sonata" could also be said about his own poems: "The strain/that labors cadence after cadence toward/resolution, wresting its course away/from the pestering piano, arrives/only after everything is so changed/that where it meant to go is no longer/possible...." Similarly, you never know where Barter's poems are going to go. But this doesn't mean they are anarchic, or are simply pleasing or inspired gatherings of images. Like music, the poems have no reason, but rather play out intimations and ideas inhering in their animating moods, memories, and thoughts. Though Barter uses a Beethoven cello sonata in tendering something about music which also wittingly or by intuition or chance refers to his own poetry, Barter's poetry is more like Bach's music than Beethoven's. The emotional restraint and preciseness of Barter's poems makes them more like Bach's music.

unknown scrawling lyrical madness on boxcars of desire
too fast too fast ...
a street poet, not a beat poet
poet, even? sure
wordsmith of no reknown
kind kindred of whitman prosey past
knock down drag out breaking hearts
put it down long ago
i am finding out now
read it aloud in the streets of your youth
don't pretend to understand but leave a little room for the
beauty that is everywhere ...

at long last jack micheline has been given a fitting tribute...of course following in the great american tradition you must of course be dead to acquire fame and or at least a hint of reception...this is a fabulous collection of poetry artwork reviews and correspondence...this is the tip of an enormous unpublished iceberg that is the scattered works of jack micheline.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the "beat" writers but many of these beats spent much of their time in front of cameras and at writing conferences. Jack Micheline lived, breathed, laboured and endured as a street poet. He lived in run-down hotel rooms and captured what he saw.He writes about real people. This volume, done masterfully by Matt Gonzalez is an important contribution to real American literary history and not the media hype. I love all the photo's and Micheline art work and extra's.

This collection of poetry by Dr. Audrey Shafer speaks to everyone who struggles to balance a career with a family, and concurrently searches to understand what this is all about. The first section, "that I call home" is a beautiful journey through the fears, longings, and rich rewards of a personal life filled with loving friends and family. Although the topics are domestic, the writing is infused with the language and imagery of medicine. Dr. Shafer views her personal life through a medical lens. Most physicians, myself included, understand this. One does not switch medical thinking on and off at the office door. Instead, it is blended with all aspects of the physician's life. Dr. Shafer perfectly captures this in her poetry. The second section, "not quite sleep" describes the joys, challenges, and occasional terrors of medical practice. Although the focus is anesthesia, Dr. Shafer's specialty, the experiences will resonate with every physician. Non-physicians will find the emotional experiences of medical practice described with unusual clarity and insight. The final section, "ok for re-entry" is harder to describe. This section is more philosophical, and in places hysterically funny and profoundly moving. Dr. Shafer bares her soul, searches for life's deeper meanings, and finds that meaning in the most unusual of places. I recommend this book to eveyone who struggles to set priorities between family and a career, as well as anyone who wants to understand how the practice of medicine permeates the lives of physicians.

My mom gave me this book last year, my Junior year in High School. Before that I wasn't interested in being a doctor, because I thought you couldn't be a doctor and have a life also. Dr. Shafer's book convinced me that it is possible to be a doctor, a wife, and a mother, and be successful at all of them. I probably won't be a poet also, but at least through her poetry I have seen medicine in a whole new way. Thanks, Dr. Shafer, from a member of the next generation of physicians (I hope!)

I have read this book many times ... experienced it, really. I am ordering more copies. Copies for friends and copies which will become thank you gifts for my doctors. Reading this book is like being transported into the heart of a physician. It is a pause between heartbeats, a glimpse of the vulernable, human side of medicine. Dr. Shafer can probably put on a good front. The front of a detached, clinically objective doctor. Her competence and efficiency probably inspire trust and confidence. However, I know her compassion, caring and empathy leak out over all those around her. Sleep Talker is like this ... sometimes stark and yet the tears on your face will belie any feeling of coldness in her poetry. One wonders how she can bear the memories. Reading her poems about her family and friends is to look at an insight in slow motion. It is a reminder to expereince those you love with all your senses and to remain thoughtful about the precious moments you have with them.

Over the past 12 months, I've read and reread this treasure. Jellema's poetry is grounded in the eccentricities of lived experience. Drawing from a rich canvass of music, life stories, art and history, Jellema weaves an tapestry of graced living.

When I sit down to study, I've been pausing and spending a few minutes breathing in a Jellema poem. His writing does what I think good poetry can do, it helps me to pay attention and listen to the rhythms of the Spirit.

A Slender Grace collects 67 poems, almost all of them new, the first such poetry anthology published by author and poet Rod Jellema in almost twenty years. Using free verse to paint winding pictures of vagrancies of daily life, and the struggle to reach for a glimmer of hope when surrounded by darkness, A Slender Grace is emotional, captivating, deftly penned, and speaks directly to the heart in a body of inspiring work urging the reader to never surrender to despair. Lullaby at Lake Michigan: Hush now. / Night's / what we missed all day. / The sun before she lit out / over the lake / over the unseen edge of the world / (Wisconsin) // pastured out / to her dark / empty fields and fields / her herds and herds / of little lights / that whisper to you // as they gaze / up there / (listen) / far and far.

Rod Jellema's "A Slender Grace" is a generous offering (105 pp.)of generous poems by a poet who knows how to say Yes. Poets, and those who love poetry, are always looking for that "Slender grace that takes you past yourself" and lets you remember that, no matter the dark, the light is surely coming. Finding, as good poets do, delight in the small things: gray boxcars, bicycle parts, the crowing of cocks, a vagrant sneaker, the spinning of a dryer at the Laundromat,he offers us in gentle tones the way toward the hopeful light.

Jellema's poems also take as their subject a trip he took to Nicaragua in 1985 as a volunteer in the Witness for Peace delegation (six poems), three poems for Vincent Van Gogh, and fine riffs on the cricket blues, Blind Willie Johnson, and "Bix Beiderbecke Composing Light."

His language is accessible, his joy in language is palpable. His images wake the reader to his "double vision," the diction is impeccable, the total effect stimulating. One wants to pick up a pen and write toward his light. One is happy to be able to return again and again to this master seeker and wordsman.

Martin Galvin

Abba Kovner one of the great Jewish Resistance heroes of the Second World War wrote these poems as he was dying of throat cancer at Sloan- Kettering Institute. They are clear and deeply moving . They reflect upon his experience in the Resistance in his many years of life in a kibbutz in Israel and upon what he is witnessing and living through in the moments of his last struggle. Behind them is the voice of a man of tremendous courage who is once again being tested as he so often has been tested before. I think these poems can be of great interest to all those going through similar tests. And they should be of interest to anyone who wishes to know more of one great human being's experience and poetry.

Sloan Kettering was first published in Hebrew in 1987 as an extended poema on Abba Kovner's terminal struggle against throat cancer. He died in Israel that year. Shadow themes and images subtly bleed through the skin of this work, in a pentimento effect that renders these 61 Eddie Levenston translations subtle, bold, and classic.

Kovner was a Jewish Holocaust and Israeli wartime hero, larger-than-life, and one of Israel's most important poets. But these works, in a voice intensely human despite the enormous events that shaped it, describe the loss of his voice to cancer.

Sloan Kettering nevertheless avoids self-pity or sturm und drang. Kovner regards his sons' photos and asks, "in their presence/ may one cry?" He speaks in understated irony. His grandchildren came for Hanukkah. "I didn't/ sing 'Ma'oz Tsur with them, you know why." He looses senses, without complaint, but will tell of it another time "if there is one." Of course, there won't be any more conversations. "Just as this one is no more/than the invention of a throat in ruins."

Kovner's past is his "burden of molten/ rocks." He wants this to "stay in the archives/ it is not for the operating table."

One poem instructing his heirs includes the first two words of the mourners' Kaddish -- Yitgadal veyitkadash (magnified and sanctified). Kovner next notes the greater suffering of others--and remembers God, reciting the prayer's third and fourth words--shemei rabba (is the Name).

He relives his fight for the survival of the Europe's Jews. He shudders here, like he did then, "challenged to stand up for his right/ to live." Expecting another time when the world would again oppose the Jewish people, Kovner presciently warns, "The worst of all comes back." He asks, "Will we ever/ get out of this terrible forest?"

In Sloan Kettering's silence echoes the great silence 65 years ago, when Jews had no idea where to turn and a Jewish prisoner was "cut off from his supervisor," lost and running from room to room....

One encounters again "a pathless wilderness/ between yellow arrows/ and blue signs." Reflecting his furtive life in Nazi-occupied Vilna, he calls the New York cancer center "a trans-life corridor."

The fingers of a black nurse mirror "the velvet pad where Mother/ kept her needles." Impossible circumstances forced Kovner to abandon her to save others. His mind and heart, however, never left her. His nights end by telling her of his fears, and about her grandchildren. "She should have a little joy/in Ponar."

He recalls Itzik Wittenburg, betrayed to the Nazis on July 16, 1943, who hoped that going along would save others. In his cell, he swallowed prussic acid. "The gate is still open." ... "a nation holding its breath."

Kovner 's metaphors also reflect the life that cancer patients struggle to keep, against hope and time. In a sense, they capture it too. Kovner describes a Thai man. His face looks like "Lost parchment/ in the heart of the desert."

Kovner understandably has no more "trust in the mercy of heaven," recalling "the day he lost patience waiting/ for the echo of his cry...to come back from empty space." Yet like all his work, these poems invoke Jewish prayers, themes and biblical proportions, some (though not all) detailed in the endnotes.

Readers may recognize Psalm 114 in Kovner's "mountains of Palmyra," where advanced radio-telescopes cause their planners to rejoice "like young goats."

They scan the universe's secrets, whose "ends flee and escape/...beyond space." This is Kovner's Jordan that fled backward. The cancer in his throat is like "An abyss fine as a pinhead/ in ambush," whose mysterious patience resembles "the galaxies of emptiness/beyond the black holes...."

These poems come as close as any to capturing absolute truth--that strangely elusive engine, invisible to most people most of the time, which poets spend their lives seeking to record. Kovner offers muted, simple humility. He writes so delicately of massacre and genocide--terms now bloodied by false invocation and overuse--that even readers unaware of his history, will find these poems pristine, awesome and beyond reproach.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

I'm not a big poetry fan, but this book is exceptional. I thought that a book about cancer would be depressing, but I found the opposite to be true. It's one of the most inspiring books I've ever read. And it is especially relevant now when there's so much talk about "heroes". The author was a true hero in the classic sense - a leader of the Jewish partisans against the Nazis, and he refers to that part of his life. But he - and many other people among us - are heroes in another sense: They are locked in a battle against cancer or other disease, and they fight it with all their might. The author is grateful for the magic of everyday comforts - his grandchildren's smiles, the rhythmic clicking of his wife knitting, the warm familiarity of his neighbors' voices. In spite of all his pain and fear, he has the guts to proclaim "death is not to be preferred". This book reminds us to cherish life.

I am an inveterate dog-earer, often bending the pages unconciously, and I find, after reading Robert B. Shaw's SOLVING FOR X, that I've folded down the corners of 17 pages! I haven't messed up a book of poetry this badly in a long, long time.

Many of the poems in this book are metrical, and quite of few of them employ perfect rhyme. One of these, my favorite in the book, is "A Roadside Flock," a poem ostensibly about copper weather vane roosters, which concludes:

" . . . their giddy doom to pivot, / prey to the winds that flounce about the sky. / It's not the life we'd live if we could live it.
And gleam gives way to verdigris, raised high // to weather drably, exiled from the ground . . . / Feel that? A hint of breeze. Birds of a feather, / their regal beaks shudder without a sound, / and all the copper flock turns tail together."

But "A Roadside Flock" has a lot of stiff competition. I also very much enjoy "Airs and Graces," "A Field of Goldenrod," "The End of the Sonnet," "Dec. 23," "Espalier," "A Paper Cut," "Ant in Amber," "Seed Catalogues in Winter," "A Flashback," "Letter of Recommendation," "Out of Character," "Static," "September Brownout," "Other Eyes: Hurricane's," "Remainders," and "Living past 19."

I'm struck by how casual Shaw's style is, how downright funny at times, without being the least bit loose or nasty. It's a tricky way to write, but Shaw has mastered it, and I think this is his best book to date.

And that's saying something when you consider his excellent previous books or poetry: THE WONDER OF SEEING DOUBLE, THE POST OFFICE MURALS RESTORED, and BELOW THE SURFACE. But don't trust me. Read everything he's written, including his superb study of the poetry of Herbert and Donne, CALL OF GOD, and judge this intelligent, accessible, witty writer for yourself.

I am an inveterate dog-earer, often bending the pages unconciously, and I find, after reading Robert B. Shaw's SOLVING FOR X, that I've folded down the corners of 17 pages! I haven't messed up a book of poetry this badly in a long, long time.

Many of the poems in this book are metrical, and quite a few of them employ perfect rhyme. One of these, my favorite in the book, is "A Roadside Flock," a poem ostensibly about copper weather vane roosters, which concludes:

" . . . their giddy doom to pivot, / prey to the winds that flounce about the sky. / It's not the life we'd live if we could live it. And gleam gives way to verdigris, raised high // to weather drably, exiled from the ground . . . / Feel that? A hint of breeze. Birds of a feather, / their regal beaks shudder without a sound, / and all the copper flock turns tail together."

But "A Roadside Flock" has a lot of stiff competition. I also very much enjoy "Airs and Graces," "A Field of Goldenrod," "The End of the Sonnet," "Dec. 23," "Espalier," "A Paper Cut," "Ant in Amber," "Seed Catalogues in Winter," "A Flashback," "Letter of Recommendation," "Out of Character," "Static," "September Brownout," "Other Eyes: Hurricane's," "Remainders," and "Living past 19."

I'm struck by how casual Shaw's style is, how downright funny at times, without being the least bit loose or nasty. It's a tricky way to write, but Shaw has mastered it, and I think this is his best book to date.

And that's saying something when you consider his excellent previous books or poetry: THE WONDER OF SEEING DOUBLE, THE POST OFFICE MURALS RESTORED, and BELOW THE SURFACE. But don't trust me. Read everything he's written, including his superb study of the poetry of Herbert and Donne, THE CALL OF GOD, and judge this intelligent, accessible, witty writer for yourself.

Robert B. Shaw's newest book of poems, Solving For X, possesses two qualities that are not always found together: lyric virtuosity and emotional depth. Few poets write so securely in their sense of line and stanza; few poets write with as much moral insight and emotional persuasiveness. Very few, indeed, combine these two qualities so happily, as in "Ant in Amber," which I quote in full:

Ever since Fate's undeviating thumb
englobed this ant in aromatic gum,
eons of weighty chafing in the earth
have milled it to a bauble of some worth.
Nature expended quite some enterprise
in getting this poor sap to fossilize.
Now honey-hued, translucent, it displays
intact the forager of former days:
every last leg the little soldier needed
is here embalmed, or we might say embeaded.
Didn't the Greeks believe such beads were spawned
as tears of sunset, hardened as next day dawned?
Knowing the source (a long-gone, weeping tree)
makes this a different kind of prodigy-
a model instance, maybe, of renewal-
interred as ant and disinterred as jewel.
Thus in our scale of values, though we can't
be sure it would appear so to the ant.

The poem displays throughout the sobriety, lyric self-awareness, and precision of the middle style. The sober clarity of the poem is a function of the diction, especially the qualifying adjectives, and of the way in which the syntax drapes the couplets: subject/predicate/subject/predicate in lines 1-4, and then a quickening of the syntax in line five, followed by the expansive adverbial phrase with the groan-worthy pun in line 6. Never is there syntactical displacement to accommodate the rhyme. It is obvious that the poet is composing by the line and the couplet and that the form has not distorted the syntax but sharpened it. The poem conveys a sense of lyric self-awareness in the self-corrections: "...embalmed, or we might say embeaded" and "a model instance, maybe, of renewal." These self-corrections or hesitations are an aspect of the almost Ciceronian rhetorical structure of the poem, with its four line introduction, its general thesis, exposition, conclusion, and peroration in the final couplet.
For all its cleverness, the poem is not light or exhibitionistic. The final couplet combines litotes and the informality of the rhyme on "can't" to prevent the rhetoric from rising beyond the level that is appropriate to the emotional weight of the argument. Although we may notice that the amber is analogous to the poem itself, this analogy is not imposed on readers.

At some point a reader wants to construe poems in relation to the poet's intentions, insofar as they can be discerned. Some of Shaw's own ambitions for his poems might be guessed from "A Paper Cut":

Whatever first impressions may allege,
this poet's work does, after all, have edge-

Witness my finger, slivered to the quick
as payback for its disapproving flick.

Granted, I turned the page with reckless haste,
calling no halt to justify my taste.

But does the stuff deserve a second reading?
Feel free to guess. It stings, but there's no bleeding.

If "bleeding" signifies the strong emotional response of a reader, this seems to be something Shaw expects to experience in poems that merit a second reading. In any poet who seeks such a response to middle style rhetoric there is much restraint and ellipsis. "Style," after all, is not the representation of a persona's emotional state, but the representation of a persona's emotional state as he is speaking. The emotions in Shaw's poems are often reflective, their sufferings and pleasures not stated but powerfully implied.
Robert Shaw is one of the wisest and most skillful poets now writing in English, and this is perhaps his finest collection yet. Anyone with a modicum of interest in contemporary poetry should seek out his work.