CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor.

Do recent changes in American law and politics mean that our national motto -- e pluribus unum -- is at last becoming a reality? Lawrence H. Fuchs searches for answers to this question by examining the historical patterns of American ethnicity and the ways in which a national political culture has evolved to accommodate ethnic diversity. Fuchs looks first at white European immigrants, showing how most of them and especially their children became part of a unifying political culture. He also describes the ways in which systems of coercive pluralism kept persons of color from fully participating in the civic culture. He documents the dismantling of those systems and the emergence of a more inclusive and stronger civic culture in which voluntary pluralism flourishes.In comparing past patterns of ethnicity in America with those of today, Fuchs finds reasons for optimism. Diversity itself has become a unifying principle, and Americans now celebrate ethnicity. One encouraging result is the acculturation of recent immigrants from Third World countries. But Fuchs also examines the tough issues of racial and ethnic conflict and the problems of the ethno-underclass, the new outsiders. The American Kaleidoscope ends with a searching analysis of public policies that protect individual rights and enable ethnic diversity to prosper.Because of his lifelong involvement with issues of race relations and ethnicity,

Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave explores the diverse strategies employed by Southern slaveholders to keep their slaves under control-from threats of sale, shackles, screw box, or treadmill, to a peck of corn a week, a dram of whiskey, a pound of tobacco, the bribe of freedom, and the promise of heaven. It explores also the counterdefensive strategies employed by the slaves to resist control-among them, arson, theft, poison, subterfuge, murder, escape, and rebellion.Norrece Jones, himself a descendent of South Carolina slaves, has written a powerful book based on intensive research in the archives of antebellum South Carolina. He has studied slave testimony, legal records, folklore, spirituals, autobiographies of whites and blacks, newspaper accounts, church records, and many other sources. He challenges views of slavery as an interdependent paternalistic system; he sees it instead as a harsh and unceasing conflict, with most slaves refusing to accept their masters' dictates and most slave owners struggling to keep slaves servile and devoted.Means of control were both subtle and brutal. For example, there were festive holidays and gifts of liquor but also sadistic punishment: recalcitrant slaves-men and women alike- were staked to the ground or trussed from rafters with "nigger cord" to be whipped; some were branded; others were hanged or torched. Many of the same masters who provided a sick room for slaves also maintained a private jail.But of all the means of control, the most sinister and the most effective was the threat of sale and separation from family. Troublemakers were routinely sold. The weak, the sick, the malingering, the disobedient, the impudent, the "incorrigible" were disposed of on the block. Slaves often aided and abetted runaways, although some, in hope of favor, were informants-every antebellum conspiracy in South Carolina was betrayed. Yet self-respect and pride survived nonetheless. "You no holy," slaves told one mistress, "We holy."

New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality - adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as :If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the relationship between morality and expediency?" And, above all, "Why is it that, in spite of all, the twentieth century is so heart-breakingly beautiful - a true vindication of humanism?"

A splendid re-publication of an indispensable book on German history.

Clear and insightful poetry on our relationship to the given world.

Teillier poems focus on the politics of the psyche and are haunted by ill-fated dreams of happiness. Selections from his work have been translated into French, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and Czechoslovakian. Teillier lives near Santiago, Chile.

A book of new poems by a major writer is an event. A book of new poems that marks a different, more powerful approach is cause for celebration. "What I looked for here," James Dickey tells us about The Eagle's Mile, "was a flicker of light 'from another direction,' and when I caught it - or thought I did - I followed where it went, for better or worse. " In this new work, Dickey edges away from the narrative-based poems of his previous books and gives instead more primacy to the language in which he writes. His poetry gains flexibility, and his poetic power becomes even surer and more clearly expressed. "I have experimented," Dickey writes, "and look forward to experimenting more."

The first documented sinking of a ship by a whale and a harrowing account by the ship's first mate of the survivors' three months adrift in small boats. A thrilling narrative that inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick.

This charming volume is a collection of ink washes produced by engraver and historian John Warner Barber (1798-1885), each depicting a specific locale in a Connecticut town. Barber, possibly the first popular American historian, created these drawings in preparation for producing wood engravings to be included in his book Connecticut Historical Collections (1836), one of the first popular local histories in the US. In creating these drawings, Barber sought realism, but also to portray the beauty in rural nature and the peacefulness and harmony of life in small-town Connecticut. The drawings, most never published before, are accompanied by contemporary descriptions of the view and buildings, and the changes that have occurred there since the mid-nineteenth century.

This is the first book published in English by of the work of Brazilian poet Adélia Prado. Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes.As Ellen Watson says in her introduction, "Adélia Prados poetry is a poetry of abundance. These poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life - necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments...And, seemingly at every turn, there is food." But also, an abundance of dark things, cancer, death, greed. These are poems of appetite, all kinds.

In the title poem "Fortress", the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control - because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed.

Colonists and Native Americans alternate in these poems of encounter between the intruding culture and the culture the colonist found. Walking in Stone refers to spiritual sources powerful enough to sink their footsteps into rock.Against such a background, John Spaulding finds voices of encounter (in a way he speaks for them by inheritance-his ancestors came to New England in 1750 and one married a Native American). His poems resemble journal entries, oral testimonies. The "knife people," the "iron men," as the Indians call them, come in "floating islands" across the sea. The colonists saw them as "wild people," "Satan's children." Separately and together in these powerful poems they suffer cold and pestilence, capture and slaughter, and although one is the military victor, both suffer spiritual loss.

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood-commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own-a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing "the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true. "Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted "in the faces of old regrets." But they are not wholly lost for they inform the present; they continue "beating loud." The Folded Heart is a lyrical compression of language, precise, intensely felt.

An excellent study of American intellectuals in the 40's and 50's.