After publishing two extraordinary poetry collections and six satirical novels she turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. This involved totally renouncing poetry, and suppressing her own books. Interviewed earlier in 1967, she spoke of her direct literary forebears as Baudelaire and Rimbaud: They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them… The main duty of the poet is to excite to send the senses reeling.’ Her poetry published in Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was Bedouin of the London evening’ in one poem: I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste.’ All her published poetry is now available in this edition for the first time in over 40 years, along with a selection of her prose. Poets, of course, as we all know, are either of their time or for all time. Rosemary Tonks was both. She wasn’t just a poet of the sixties she was a true poet of any era but she has sent us strange messages from them, alive, fresh and surprising today… there is possibly no other poet who has caught with such haughty, self-ironising contempt, the loucheness of the period, or the anger it could touch off in brooding bystanders… Rosemary Tonks’ imagery has a daring for which it’s hard to find a parallel in British poetry.’ John Hartley Williams, Poetry Review.

    Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.Commons's fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.

    The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.

    Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and hisShuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciationAnd invention, is this the image of the promised end?All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandonedFor love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.—from "Gulf Music"An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate.Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.

    Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.from "Signs Taken for Wonders" ... Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin....

    . . . It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise." —The Los Angeles Review of Books“. . .the poems [in Mezzanines] have doors that open and invite you inside. The rooms of the house may be odd, and the stairwells may lead in strange directions, but you, as the reader, remain beckoned. [Olzmann] hasn’t invited you in just to leave you. He’s got stories to tell, and they’re good.” —The Huffington Post BlogThere is no place Matthew Olzmann doesn’t visit in his poignant debut. From underwater to outer space, Mezzanines is a contained universe, constantly shifting through multiple perceptions of the surreal and the real. A lyrical conversation with mortality, Olzmann explores identity, faith, and our sense of place, with an acute awareness of our minute existence.From "NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor":How many shadows are there left to name?Logophobia is the fear of words. Keraunothnetophobiais the fear of falling man-made satellites.Imagine this last one:you walk outside and look to heavenexpecting a sky lab plunging down on you—wireseverywhere, bolts loosening, metal body in flames.Instead, you see only blue, endless blue,the color of a baby’s new blanket, cloaking everything.Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.