This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope - from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere the language is outrageously wet and vivid - sliced orange language. Though the poems often take the form of couplets, quatrains, or some other repeatable structure, the results are daringly unexpected, irrational, compelling, astonishingly beautiful, and moving.

Calvin Bedient's fourth collection, The Multiple, meets an unspeakably excessive reality with an unremitting intensity of its own. The "multiple" in question is the imbroglio of entwinements and failed copulas within us and all around us, the reality underlying and giving the lie to our stereotypes. Dazzlingly resourceful--witty, multi-tonal, musical, propositional, painterly--the poems thump the increasingly empty box of cultural goods, an inheritance that isn't really ours. We are left with a naked need for creativity in a cosmos whose gift of time is a gift of chaos. If in a universe that is "not-one . . . the rhapsodic is the avenue to the truth," as Alain Badiou says, the quality of the rhapsodic in The Multiple is as cacophonous and unforgiving as it is lyrical and hooked. The truth is extreme, this aggressively uncensored book says, as it battles to give equal power to a savage voice and a soaring voice. Strong in their invisible architecture, these are poems of wild openness and sheer aliveness.

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style - its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

In Ewa Chrusciel's first book in English, Strata, an exile's memories are . . . at once a rapture of possession (of being possessed) and defeatingly untotalizable. Strata is . . . a tumultuous revelation of how much of the past there still is, right here in the near flight of letters, and of the burn of being in time at all, the difficulty of catching up with oneself in a universe that is never one, but always scattered. Strata is a book of concuspiscences, of combings for pleasures, yes, but even more for the Sacred Book it wants to be. In its every line, it shows that the rhapsodic is the right approach to the truth about the world. - from the foreword by Calvin Bedient Praise for Ewa Chrusciel's poetry "With a wonderful insistence, each phrase in Ewa Chrusciel's prose poetry can be experienced as a moment of transition, of what Emerson would have called a darting aim. "Whenever we visited, my grandfather would put his chair on the road and wait," Chrusciel writes. "Kraina na Bosaka. We were the apparition of deer. Pray, why chase each stalk of wounded light?"' - Tony Brinkley, Boston Review

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

In his third book of poems, Mark Levine continues his exploration of the rhythms and forms of memory. "The Wilds" is set in the border regions between natural and cultivated states, childhood and adulthood, past and present. "We were boys," says the speaker of the opening poem, "boyish, almost girls. Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled." Austere and lyrical, the music of these poems resonates with echoes of poetic tradition-Wyatt, Jonson, Milton, Eliot-yet is singularly modern.

"In this altogether brilliant collection, the various but carefully sequenced (and deeply consequential) poems unfold in a world undergoing eclipse. It is a transient, unsettling, and fascinating phenomenon, the casting of shadows by shadows (of experience, literature, language, the natural sun) traveling across the totality of the known world: here. The process does not produce negation. It is, on the contrary, an odd plus. And the darkness is never complete; it is surprised into perceptibility by sources of counter-illumination, among them wit, intelligence, and, above all (as underlying all), love."--Lyn Hejinian

"Reddy's book is new, utterly confident, clear, true to itself. It is about any world in which any one of us in love can learn something about what has happened to us--a world utterly and deeply known: ecstatic and forlorn. This is also a confident guide to our best life and to the language of that unknown place in which we bring to mind for the first time what we think and feel. At the end, Reddy's book leaves us with a deeper understanding of the wisdom of all good guides and poets: 'Where one goes, one goes alone.'"--Allen Grossman, Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University and author of "Sweet Youth

"The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying" writes Reddy in this profoundly moving first collection. And, indeed, a search for the nature of the 'present' continuously animates this stunning, anguished yet level-headed attempt to reconstruct a history of our kind as if from some as-yet unknown vantage point. Striving for a complex objectivity, the book explodes prior notions of orientation--geographic, historical, cultural--andrecovers from the debris a profoundly trustworthy reorientation, political as well as emotional. Reddy speaks to us fully self-conscious and, strangely, fully innocent. It is a mesmerizing voice."--Jorie Graham

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

In "The Yeats Brothers"," "Calvin Bedient delivers a brilliant exploration of modernism through the mutual illumination provided by Ireland's greatest poet and greatest painter. By examining the poems of the one and the paintings of the other, he recovers an often overlooked quality both artists embraced in their work--that core feature of modernism, a thoroughgoing preoccupation with motion and fluidity, that terrifying encounter with the universe conceptualized as force.Bedient's is the first book to treat W. B. Yeats and Jack Yeats as twin geniuses in the detection and representation of chaos. William Butler Yeats's love and fear of motion pervade every aspect of his poetry, helping to determine his themes, riddle his images, and shape the cadences of his verse. Jack Yeats's focus on change and motion caused him to engage with the cross-currents of his time, not--as sometimes thought--to remain locked in the past. Through daring and nuanced readings of the poems and analyses of the paintings, Bedient reveals the two artists to have been complicit with modernism--against homogeneity, alert to divisions, polyphony, and restlessness in things and in ourselves. Adept in close discussion of poetic and painterly style, and magisterial in his grasp of theorists from Adorno through Zizek, Bedient provides us with genuinely new interpretations of the Yeats brothers' work, and with a more sophisticated understanding of modernism. "There are dozens of books on W. B. Yeats, and some on his brother Jack, but no one has put the two together before. Calvin Bedient does so very adroitly, without conflating their respective achievements. Bedient argues brilliantly that these two very different artists reveal a meaningful shortcoming in our customary understanding of modernism; by showing that both were fascinated by movement, or mobility--the diverse processes of change--Bedient pulls the poet toward the painter to show these two artists in sympathy with the thought of their time. An important revisionary argument about the meaning of modernism, Bedient's work also exhibits a lively, candid critic explaining the work of the Yeats brothers in readings that constantly repay attention. No one could have a better companion while reading W. B. Yeats' poems, or viewing Jack Yeats' paintings." --Robert von Hallberg, University of Chicago "Welcome to the 'terrible novelty of light.' Fearless, virtuosic, turbulence-charged, "The Yeats Brothers and Modernism's Love of Motion"is a ravishing triumph. Plunging with nonetheless meticulous yet rippling (and yes, muscled) analytic brilliance and sensuousness through the poems and paintings of W.B. and Jack Yeats, Bedient gives us one of the most profound, emulatively thrilling, stylish, and wide-awake celebrations of poetry, of painting, and of Modernism itself, one could hope to read. No one has better caught--or rather transmitted--so much of the towering "and" torrential genius of the Yeats brothers, seen here in a rushing storm of cultural, political, aesthetic, and daemonic forces. The unstaunched motive, and emotive, force of Bedient's book takes us directly into the tragic yet joyful--indeed exultant--leap of poem after poem, canvas after canvas, all of them luminous, endlessly reconstitutive and volatile elements of what remains, in these gorgeous pages, the 'bursting dawn' of their Movement, still redolent as it is with the 'storm-scattered intricacy' of night." --Peter Sacks, Harvard University "This is a captivating and theoretically sophisticated study of what Calvin Bedient identifies as mobility in the Modernist poems and paintings of the two Yeats brothers. Jack Yeats, the painter, has been curiously neglected by the art world outside Ireland; Bedient here reclaims his work as the worthy visual counterpart to the lyric poems of Jack's famous brother William Butler Yeats, a poet who relentlessly interrogated the regimes of representation as they were given to him at the turn of the twentieth century. Both poet and painter devised art constructs that come to terms with the restlessness, the uncertainty, and the stark divisions of Modernism. Like Bedient's earlier critical studies, """The Yeats Brothers"is startlingly original." --Marjorie Perloff, author of "Wittgenstein's Ladder" and "Twenty-First Century Modernism"

Carol Snow's award-winning poetry has been admired and celebrated as 'work of difficult beauty' (Robert Hass), 'ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference' ("Boston Review"), teaching us 'how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith' (Jorie Graham). In this, her third volume, Snow continues to mine the language to its most mysterious depths and to explore the possibilities its meanings and mechanics hold for definition, transformation, and emotional truth. These poems place us before, and in, language - as we stand before, and in, the world. "The Seventy Prepositions" comprises three suites of poems. The first, 'Vocabulary Sentences', reflects on words and reality by taking as a formal motif the sort of sentences used to test vocabulary skills in elementary school. The poems of the second suite, 'Vantage', gather loosely around questions of perspective and perception. The closing suite finds its inspiration in the Japanese dry-landscape gardens known as karesansui, such as the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto. Here the poet approaches composition as one faces a 'miniature Zen garden', choosing and positioning words rather than stones, formally, precisely, evocatively.