"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.

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."

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.'

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

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.

'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.