"A book of poems should have exactly the same fullness and risk and lay itself open to the same judgment as a life," says Allen Grossman. Of the Great House, which includes sections of A Harlot's Hire (1961), Grossman's first published book, as well as his most recent poetry, presents an anatomy of the poet's working life. The title poem invokes "the sighted singer, in a/Passionate, laboring house," who confronts those figures in his unconscious which influence and interfere with poetic vision, braving the necessary destructions until "there is nothing in place of what/I know, the only thing that is--the world." Part II, "The Pictures in a Man's Life," seeks out relationships among the haunting, inspiring, "demonically incoherent facts of life in the world--the poet's parents, yellowwoods blooming on a lawn, closeness to an earlier self. "The Dream Which Wakes the Sleeper Does Not End" contains poems from an earlier life, and Of the Great House closes with "An Inventory of Destructions," a summing and a summoning: "the poet speaks to the unborn in the/language of the born, and to the born he speaks/The language of the unborn--Break down and build!/Destructions are of the poet. Death is of God."

"True-Love "is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman's long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry's singular mission is to bind love and truth together--love that desires the beloved's continued life, knotted with the truth of life's contingency--to help make us more present to each other.

In the spirit of Blake's vow of "mental fight," Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno's maxim "No poetry after Auschwitz," to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman's readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. "True-Love" is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.

Achieving Coherence in District Improvement focuses on a problem of practice faced by educational leaders across the nation: how to effectively manage the relationship between the central office and schools. The book is based on a study of five large urban districts that have demonstrated improvement in student achievement. The authors-all members of Harvard University's Public Education Leadership Project (PELP)-argue that there is no "one best way" to structure the central offi ce-school relationship. Instead, they say, what matters is whether district leaders eff ectively select and implement their strategy by achieving coherence among key elementsand actors-the district's environment, resources, systems, structures, stakeholders, and culture. The authors examine the fi ve districts' approaches in detail and point to a number of important findings. First, they emphasize that a clear, shared understanding of decision rights in key areas-academic programming, budgeting, and staffing-is essential to developing an eff ective central office-school relationship. Second, they stress the importance of building mutually supportive and trusting relationships between district leaders and principals. Third, they highlight the ways that culture and the external environment infl uence the relationship between the central office and schools. Each chapter also provides relevant "Lessons for Practice"-actionable takeaways-that educational leaders from any district can use to improve the central office-school relationship.

Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders. The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools.

Allen Grossman's combined reputation as a poet and as a professor of poetry gives him an unusual importance in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. In this new collection Grossman revisits the Long Schoolroom of poetic principle--where he eventually learned to reconsider the notion that poetry was cultural work of the kind that contributed unambiguously to the peace of the world. The jist of what he learned--of what his lessons taught him--was (in the sentence of Oliver Wendell Holmes): Where most men have died, there is the greatest interest. According to Grossman, violence arises not merely from the barbarian outside of the culture the poet serves, but from the inner logic of that culture; not, as he would now say, from the defeat of cultural membership but from the terms of cultural membership itself. Grossman analyzes the bitter logic of the poetic principle as it is articulated in exemplary texts and figures, including Bede's Caedmon and Milton. But the heart of The Long Schoolroom is American, ranging from essays on Whitman and Lincoln to an in-depth review of the work of Hart Crane. His final essays probe the example of postmodern Jewish and Christian poetry in this country, most notably the work of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg, as it searches for an understanding of holiness in the production and control of violence. Allen Grossman is author of The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with Mark Halliday), and most recently, The Philosopher's Window. He is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.

During a week in January 1981, poets Allen Grossman and Mark Halliday met for a series of conversations exploring "the meanings for us as poets arising from the difference between us-- differences of generation and education as well as of temperament and poetic style." The result was "Against Our Vanishing", which Charles Altieri called " the best in contemporary poetic thinking."

"The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers" makes available a revised and significantly expanded version of "Against Our Vanishing" and includes Grossman's recent treatise "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in the Speculative Poetics". This combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-- across generations-- of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure". For students and teachers, for writers and readers, "The Sighted Singer" is a splendid introduction to both the tradition of poetry and its contemporary practice.

'A whole life, when it is written as a poem, ' says Allen Grossman, 'is like the whole of life.' The structure of his 'New and Selected' poems produces an encounter of the mind with the pasts it knows, while each successive future as it becomes present addresses hard questions to the unknowns crowding behind.

"True-Love" is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman's long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry's singular mission is to bind love and truth together - love that desires the beloved's continued life, knotted with the truth of life's contingency - to help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blake's vow of 'mental fight,' Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno's maxim 'No poetry after Auschwitz,' to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman's readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. "True-Love" is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another. 'The writings of Allen Grossman have a devoted following and are accorded a nearly legendary status by poets and scholars of poetry alike. With "True-Love", his readers will have an opportunity to follow the development of his thinking about the contrary forces of violence and beholding at work in all poetic making and reception. This paradoxical and 'bitter logic,' perennially yoking destruction to recognition, is treated in these essays with a depth and rigor that could only come out of the lifetime of thought Grossman has brought to it.'

Allen Grossman's newest work Descartes' Loneliness blends the comic and tragic. As the writer Ha Jin once wrote, it is "remarkable for the stout spirit of the speaker who dares to be funny while tackling such an austere subject as death." Poems such as "The Famished Dead," where the poet is visited by lost loved ones, "one at a time," confirm Jorie Graham's observation that "from the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry to be heard Grossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent."

A series of poems traces the course of a love affair from both the man's and the woman's point of view.

Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders. The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools.

Teaching by the case method has the potential to affect profoundly the way that teachers, students, and professionals approach the learning process. This companion volume includes detailed teaching notes on each case in the coursebook, with an emphasis on making cases drawn from other disciplines relevant to education administrators. It also includes C. Roland Christensen's classic essay on teaching by the case method, ""The Premises and Practices of Discussion Teaching."" Both experienced instructors and those new to the case method will find this instructor's guide an invaluable resource.

Achieving Coherence in District Improvement focuses on a problem of practice faced by educational leaders across the nation: how to effectively manage the relationship between the central office and schools. The book is based on a study of five large urban districts that have demonstrated improvement in student achievement. The authors-all members of Harvard University's Public Education Leadership Project (PELP)-argue that there is no "one best way" to structure the central offi ce-school relationship. Instead, they say, what matters is whether district leaders eff ectively select and implement their strategy by achieving coherence among key elementsand actors-the district's environment, resources, systems, structures, stakeholders, and culture. The authors examine the fi ve districts' approaches in detail and point to a number of important findings. First, they emphasize that a clear, shared understanding of decision rights in key areas-academic programming, budgeting, and staffing-is essential to developing an eff ective central office-school relationship. Second, they stress the importance of building mutually supportive and trusting relationships between district leaders and principals. Third, they highlight the ways that culture and the external environment infl uence the relationship between the central office and schools. Each chapter also provides relevant "Lessons for Practice"-actionable takeaways-that educational leaders from any district can use to improve the central office-school relationship.

The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River is Allen Grossman's first collection with New Directions. His voice is astonishingly contemporary, his often dissociated imagery bordering on the surreal--yet one hears in his verse classical and Biblical echoes and, on occasion, darker medieval undertones. The brilliance of his imagination works against a measured eloquence, setting up a fine-edged tension not unlike the prophetic verse of William Blake, the wild dithyrambs of David, or the more controlled metrics of Catullus and Villon.

The speaker of The Philosopher's Window and Other Poems, Allen Grossman tells us, is "an old man compelled by the insistent questioning of the children to explain himself"-and in this way, the world. He begins with creation ("The Great Work Farm Elegy"), recalls the romantic quest of youth ("The Philosopher's Window"), returns to reality ("The Snowfall" and "Whoever Builds"). His tales told, the old man wakes in a stormy springtime ("June, June"), "when the lilacs are gone." Grossman's allegory of life's journey, at once sonorous and antic, takes in the high and the low in these new visionary songs of innocence and experience. Allen Grossman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He counts among his many honors and awards MacArthur, Guggenheim, and NEA fellowships, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, and the PEN-Sheaffer/New England Award for Literary Distinction. The Philosopher's Window is his eighth book of poetry. His previous collection, The Ether Dome & Other Poems New and Selected (1991), was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee.

'A whole life, when it is written as a poem, ' says Allen Grossman, 'is like the whole of life.' The structure of his 'New and Selected' poems produces an encounter of the mind with the pasts it knows, while each successive future as it becomes present addresses hard questions to the unknowns crowding behind.

The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River is Allen Grossman's first collection with New Directions. His voice is astonishingly contemporary, his often dissociated imagery bordering on the surreal--yet one hears in his verse classical and Biblical echoes and, on occasion, darker medieval undertones. The brilliance of his imagination works against a measured eloquence, setting up a fine-edged tension not unlike the prophetic verse of William Blake, the wild dithyrambs of David, or the more controlled metrics of Catullus and Villon.

A comprehensive lifetime selection of poetryfrom the Sweet Youth to the Old Man. Of the early work of Allen Grossman, the late Robert Fitzgerald once wrote: "At times they seem poems of great age, poems at the world's verge, at the verge of time." Of the later work, Jorie Graham observed: "In [his] marriage of meanspart almanac, part allegory, part advice column, obituary page, hymnal, epic dramafrom the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry out to be heardGrossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent." In Sweet Youth, the younger poet and the older one meet at an eternal moment and a dialogue in poetry ensues, as the Allen Grossman of 2001 and the Allen Grossman of nearly fifty years earlier respond to one another's words.The poems of the "Sweet Youth", some of them dating to the early '50s, were originally collected in the poet's first three books: A Harlot's Hire (1961), The Recluse (1965), And the Dew Lay All Night Upon My Branch (1973). Since then, there have been six more books of poetry and four of prose, though in "Sweet Youth," all the poems of "Old Man" are new, written in his seventieth year. Grossman is now the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.