Celebratory or eligiac, these poems record the author’s “two-headed journey” to root herself - geographically and emotionally - in the world. Becker’s poems are from remote and familiar outposts: the watery evanescence of Venice contrasts with the desert of the American Southwest; we lean with her over the rim of a canyon or stand back to study a Giacometti sculpture. From such settings arise poems on the death of a sibling, the consoling power of painting and sculpture; others celebrate the erotic and the capacity of the female body for pleasure and pain.

What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, like the Jews in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land, the soul trapped in exile from God.

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.

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.

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.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is that rare combination, a writer equally admired as poet and critic. The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of her writing: from the opening poem, "Fifty," funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the Persian mystic Rumi, to the provactive "Meditation in Seven Days," whose central assumption is that we may find in the Bible traces of a Canaanite goddess whose worship was forbidden with the advent of patriarchal monotheism. But if her subjects may seem formidable, her poems are not. Ostriker is accessible, witty, daring, and humane, and she has become one of the most praised poets of her generation.

The speaker in Irene McKinney’s poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure. The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney’s poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.

In Woman of the River one of the major voices in Latin American poetry confronts the political realities of contemporary Central America. Many of the poems are political, direct, and condemnatory of the United States’ presence in Latin America, and they are rich, human documents rooted in Alegria’s knowledge of and love for her subjects. As Carolyn Forche has written of Alegria’s previous selection of poems, Flowers from the Volcano: “These poems are testimonies to the value of a single human memory, political in the sense that there is no life apart from our common destiny. They are poems of passionate witness and confrontation. Responding to those who would state that politics has no place in poetry, she would add her voice to that of Neruda’s: we do not wish to please them . . . .” She carries within her the ancient blood of the Pipiles and laces her language with mesitizo richness.”

Kate Daniels’s central myth is that of Niobe, the mother in Greek mythology whose children were killed by the gods because of her great pride in them. She taps the lasting power of the ancient story in poems about personal loss and political insanity. Though the subjects are frequently grim, the final effect of the book is not, since Daniels’s central theme is endurance, the discovery of what we need to survive.

Mark Irwin's boyhood near the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, haunts his poetry. This book of three elegies explores the nature of remembered time and space-personal, historical, geological-against the progression of time-evolution, germination, cell division, nuclear fission, the decay of memory and feeling. This, the poet says, is a kind of "fossil record" of science's impact on the modern world. Entropy (the tendency of atoms towards disorder) becomes a god, a blueprint for possibility. Disorder-frenzy, darkness, chaos-leads to evolution and evolution to order, harmony, and beauty. A star burns and sunlight falls on the world.

A collection of poetry from an award-winning poet, playwright and novelist.

Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being.Heather McHugh's companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of "stitches in hand and birds in time"; "We part/ before we part; indeed,/ we part before we meet..." She studies "going matched with coming." She begins with a series of elegies that bring sexuality and death into brutal juxtaposition. Living and dying are the occasions of these poems, the soul the ultimate concern. This poetry takes to heart the fundamental strangeness of being.

A precise and passionate collection by a brave new voice in poetry.

Rivers, rains, oceans, floods-an abiding fascination with the sea-inspire much of the imagery and musicality in this first book by A.E. Stringer. In Channel markers, Stringer explores the delicate balance between the island of himself and his fluid surrounding environment, embarking on a voyage to find himself and the others-a blind man, a sailor, and a bum-around him. He discovers that solid ground is a place of only tentative security, both threatened and enchanted by the power of the sea.

Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself.

When Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam's Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam's lifetime. "How should I mourn? " David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam's first bath, a "holy/Rite"; tying the shoelaces of the "little man"; traveling to Greece, where Sam is "the first.../to see the holy moon." With painful wit and regret he summons up the image of his son's blue Toyota, fastidiously transformed by Sam and his girlfriend into a "love nest." Ray muses on what he taught Sam and what Sam taught him. Originally published in 1987, Sam's Book won the 1988 Maurice English Poetry Award.