In her fifth collection, Rosanna Warren draws inspiration not only from her own life but also from the works of other artists, both classical and contemporary, real and imagined. Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. She eulogizes her mother in poems such as "Mediterranean," where she writes, "the mystery was / not that she walked there, ten years after her death, / / but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place-." In other poems, Warren contemplates wreckage and sorrow in family life, in Hurricane Katrina, and in the Trojan War, but also moments of eerie blessing. In her most forceful collection to date, she obsessively traces themes, both ancient and modern, in a voice compelling and deeply persuasive. from "Mediterranean" There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve, some question she hadn't answered, and yesterday, so clearly seeing her pace before me it rose again to the tip of my tongue, and the mystery was not that she walked there, ten years after her death, but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place-

Already tested in performance on the stage, this translation shows for the first time in English the striking interplay of voices in Euripides' Suppliant Women. Torn between the mothers' lament over the dead and proud civic eulogy, between calls for a just war and grief for the fallen, the play captures with unremitting force the competing poles of the human psyche. The translators, Rosanna Warren and Stephen Scully, extenuate the contrasting tonalities in counterpoint of female lament and male reasoned discourse in this play where the silent dead hold, finally, centre stage.

The 1993 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets

"Stained Glass is a distinguished and elegiac book: somber, frequently bitter, but always invested with an authentic, quite marvelous aesthetic dignity. It marks the emergence into highly individual voice of an important poet of the eminence of the late May Swenson, beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets. Some of the poems—'Season Due,' 'Science Lessons,' most of all, 'The Broken Pot'—are worthy of canonization."—Harold Bloom

"Conspicuous in Rosanna Warren's poems is the passion that presses them into being, and the skill that transforms them into art."—Anne Stevenson

"The glittering promise of Rosanna Warren's earlier work has now been fulfilled in the deeper gleam of this outstanding new book. Here are memorable and moving poems in which learning provides wings, rather than freight and in which grace augments, rather than saps, strength. In 'Eskimo Mother,' Pornography,' 'Tide Pickers,' 'Lena's House: Watercolor,' and the final powerful Homeric meditation—to name only a few—she clearly shows herself to be among the very best poets of her generation."— John Hollander

"The cost of things, of every human connection: this is the central theme of Rosanna Warren's fierce and haunting second book. It is a measure of her command as a poet that where the elegiac theme runs deepest—'Song,' 'The Cormorant,' and 'His Long Home' are examples, among many others—her craft most truly find itself."—Amy Clampitt

In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence as though to seize on a new life. Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief."

Contains elegies of love and death and poems exploring the complexities of nature and art and tracing the constant conflict between the earth and the restless human mind.