Reluctant Gravities

As the author herself says, she "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not.

Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet as a trilogy and now together in one volume at last.

An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: “Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives” (Ben Lerner, Jacket) Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.” Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

To anyone observing the current state of English-language poetry, it has become increasingly apparent that we are in a state of transition, in which poetry is moving in several directions at once (Language poetry, MFA-inspired confessional verse, New Formalism). This book is the first of its kind, gathering young poets who, working outside the established camps, develop new directions in contemporary poetry. Contributors include: Frank Rogaczewski, Brooke Bergan, Randolph Healy, Mike Barrett, Eric Elshtain, Trevor Joyce, Catherine Kasper, Karen Mac Cormack, and Peter Middleton.

A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro), the first collection of new poems by the great Mexican author Octavio Paz since his Return (Vuelta) of 1975, was originally published as the final section of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Among these later poems is a series of works dedicated to such artists as Miró, Balthus, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Tapies, Alechinsky, Monet, and Matta, as well as a number of epigrammatic and Chinese-like lyrics. Two remarkable long poems --"I Speak of the City," a Whitmanesque apocalyptic evocation of the contemporary urban nightmare, and "Letter of Testimony," a meditation on love and death--are emblematic of the mature poet in a prophetic voice.

"Levertov's master--more than mastery, because she is one of the originators--of contemporary poetic form, informed with a fierce, generous intelligence, can be frightening." --Ursula Le Guin, Washington Post