Unread. Pages clean and bright. Binding tight and strong. Mild shelfwear to cover, including one shallow scratch.

"Seventeen interviews with George and Mary Oppen, conducted between 1968 and 1987, are brought together for the first time. These conversations provide a unique account of a major American poet's evolution. It is Oppen's detailed commentary on his own writing, and his explanations of how individual poems unfold, which gives special importance to these new collected interviews" --Provided by publisher.

"Stephen Cope approaches Oppen's various prose writings--essays, bound daybooks and papers of interest—with the same intensive and self-reflexive care that Oppen's poems cultivate toward the world. This is exemplary editing of exemplary thinking. I was surprised and delighted by many of the particulars, especially a brilliantly measured review of Charles Olson. But the major revelation was the range and precision and constructivist architecture that went into Oppen's Daybooks: they rival his books of poetry, as if Minima Moralia could thrive on amphetamines."—Charles Altieri "George Oppen's daybooks, prose and papers offer the singular record of a mind determinedly thinking toward poetry, the world and human company, and that elusive point where they converge. In these pages, scrupulously assembled, edited and annotated by Stephen Cope, we find the groundwork for some of the finest American verse of the twentieth century. The collection should prove invaluable to those interested in the often fitful, yet resolute, steps along the way of truths not easily attained."—Michael Palmer, author of Company of Moths "Any number of poets keep notebooks, but George Oppen's are unique in their rigor, their conceptual profundity, and especially their ethical awareness and insistent self-criticism. Stephen Cope's meticulously edited and annotated collection of Oppen's "Daybooks," short critical essays, and fugitive pieces should be required reading for anyone who cares about the place of poetry in the post-World War II era. With his characteristic modesty, Oppen didn't set out to formulate a full-scale aesthetic; he just happened to produce one of the finest we have."—Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media "Here is the essential record of George Oppen's indelible voice, astonishing as it wanders and discovers a new mode 'between the grim gray lines of the Philistines and the ramshackle emplacements of Bohemia' in order to recover an open ground that is, in the fact, ' the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth.' Few documents in our time would better serve to illuminate the hard-won life of being a poet in the American language than this volume, brilliantly edited by Stephen Cope. Simply put, what a laboratory is to hard science, these daybooks are to poetry."—Peter Gizzi, author of The Outernationale

This volume brings together new work along with poems gathered from nine previous collections. When Linda Pastan's first book was published in 1971, the Jerusalem Post wrote, she "in large measure fulfilled Emerson's dream the revelation of the miraculous in the common.' " Since then Pastan has continued to explore the complexities, passion, and dangers under the surfaces of ordinary life. "Some critics point to Emily Dickinson when citing Pastan's lapidary style and metaphysical wit, a comparison that does justice to either poet when Pastan is at her best." Gettysburg Review "Pastan's unfailing mastery of her medium holds the darkness firmly in check." New York Times Book Review National Book Award finalist Linda Pastan was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1993."

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, LETTERS / POETRY

In the pages of Gary Barwin's latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world. Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us - that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of "nature" and "the animal." As philosophical as it is entertaining - weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more - No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.

The author describes his activities as a sportsman, his involvement in the London literary circle, and the beginnings of his career as a poet