A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human. Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."

In the pivotal poem "Marking Time," which appears almost exactly halfway through Peter Filkins's fourth collection of poetry, the speaker reflects on the death of a sibling and how time is marked by our memories. These memories, these moments--whether spent contemplating a painting by Vermeer or the simple toss of a bean bag--ultimately shape who we are. "Yet you are with me here, with me here again, / where neither that moon nor you exist, but live / tethered to this memory composed of words."

These are poems unafraid to be graceful and engaging. They attain an assurance and stability rare in contemporary poetry, while their careful balance of sadness and joy reminds the reader of the difficult negotiations we make in life.

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. However, his works are far more extensive than these familiar works. They include historical novels, political pamphlets, historical studies, science fiction novels and, last but not least, numerous publications on spiritualism. Photography plays a central role in his work and gives rise to a highly peculiar world of imagination. The photographs allow us to take a look at the world in around 1900 with all its oddities. For Conan Doyle's contemporaries, Sherlock Holmes was a real figure. To Conan Doyle, photographs of elves, the dead and ghosts testified to their existence. This book collects these images, along with the imaginarium that surrounds them.

By turns discursive, dramatic, and lyrical, AUGUSTINE'S VISION presents a startlingly good poet who courageously interrogates ideas of evil, sin, and death while celebrating the goodness of creation, including both nature and the creations of humankind. Indeed, many of the poems are inspired responses to other artists: Vermeer, Monet, Wilfred Owen, Polanski's Chinatown. The poet's own work bids fair to inspire others, as beautiful phrases such as "flowers / afloat on the air" or "a stillness loud with geese" float to the surface of the page. In particular, his poem "Waterlilies," consisting of a single sentence that runs for twenty-one lines, is a marvelous summation of the contrary elements that art makes cohere. You won't want to miss this ambitious collection that possesses poise, grace, and intellectual fearlessness. - KELLY CHERRY

Only recently available for the first time in English, "Panorama" is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, "Panorama" is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I-era Bohemia of Josef's youth, to a German boarding school full of creeping prejudice, through an infamous extermination camp, and finally to Josef's self-imposed exile abroad, achieving veracity and power through a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our greatest modern masters. The author of six novels as well as the monumental account of his experiences in a Nazi labor camp, "Theresienstadt 1941-1945, " H. G. Adler is an essential author with unique historical importance. "Panorama" is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.

These two fragments of novels, Ingeborg Bachmann's only untranslated works of fiction, were intended to follow the widely acclaimed Malina in a cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Although Bachmann died before completing them, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann stand on their own, continuing Bachmann's tradition of using language to confront the disease plaguing human relationships. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the "ways of dying" inflicted upon the living from outside and from within, through history, politics, religion, family, gender relations, and the self.

Bachmann's allegiance to the twin muses of memory and history, as well as her perception of fascism as not being limited to the context of the war but also existing within the intimate relations of everyday life between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, psychiatrists and patients' are supremely evident in The Book of Franza. Here, Bachmann follows a woman who escapes from a sanitorium and, after years of silence, sends her brother a cryptic telegram. Rightly suspecting that she has fled her sadistic husband -- a renowned Austrian psychiatrist whose intimate relations have merged with his studies of concentration camps -- her brother finds her in their childhood home. Together they travel to Egypt, where Franza slowly begins to regain her bearings. But Franza's desire to cleanse herself by journeying into the heart of the desert's void ends in tragedy, as she becomes the victim of a horrible act of violence.

Unlike Franza, who attempts to flee her past but fails, the heroine of Requiem for Fanny Goldmann makes no attempt to escape her history. Thisnovel tells of the demise of a Viennese actress who is manipulated by a younger, ambitious playwright to advance his career. Deception follows disloyalty; the final treachery comes when the playwright portrays her in a novel, which secures his fame and, in Fanny's eyes, robs her of her future. Caught in a perpetual stasis, Fanny suffers in total obscurity, as her present is stolen from her as well.

Whether analyzing the place where the self begins and the power of history ends or the ways in which women are forced to be complicit in their mistreatment at the hands of men, Bachmann's critical approach to the human psyche is unparalleled. Mesmerizing and profound, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann constitute the final evidence that Ingeborg Bachmann is the most important female German-language writer of the postwar period.