The human mind shapes disparate landscapes to its own contours in this rich and varied collection of poems by Catharine Savage Brosman. The canyon country of the Southwest, parts of Virginia, the Gulf Coast, France, and the Caribbean figure prominently in the poet’s meditations on the alchemy that occurs in that groove where the mind meets the world. Brosman uses a variety of verse forms to explore her theme, which is the triumph of human perspective. Her technical mastery and virtuosity support a wisdom that is as distilled as the desert air. The title poem opens the collection and introduces the theme: What was proposed in ecstasies of clouds and later, vast illuminations only seems transcendent, trumpeting glory; the light consumes itself, without desire. At dusk, images flush up on radiant wings, and fill the air with cries from distant flights. Throughout the volume, the poet ponders the connections between action and love, between present and past, between people and places. She displays an extraordinary sensitivity to landscapes and to the rituals of place, and in “Peaches”: This fruit preserved in husbanding happiness for future weeks; something of autumn is already in their ripening, the reconciliation of reason and love. All of the poems speak to the search for a language by which to apprehend the experience of the world. In some, this search is more overt, as in “Crossing to Evian”: . . . Later, friends will ask us for accounts, supposing that we bring back something neat and telling, like a photograph; but have you tried to fit a glimpse of order, knowing and perfected in its resplendent gaze, into the journey’s darkness, the moving contours of the mind? Brosman’s voice is very much her own and one that has a great deal to say in this extraordinary work.

As humanity’s collective consciousness evolves and expands, more of us are experiencing phenomena—voices no one else hears, visions no one else sees, intense intuitive feelings that presage the future or enable us to telepathically connect to loved ones. Some of us communicate with the dead, see interdimensional beings, claim to have been abducted by aliens. And some of us experience synchronicities that defy the odds. Are we outliers? Or are we, as a growing number of psychiatrists, scientists, and researchers now recognize, tapping into a matrix of reality far more vast and complex than what science currently recognizes?

Provides up-to-date profiles on the careers of leading and emerging poets.

In Passages, Catharine Savage Brosman presents journeys between the world and spirit, journeys that share an axis of yearning for a realm as pure as desire. Brosman refracts through metrical virtuosity, historical imagination, and a vision like cleansing light a world alive with coruscating color and sensual textures. Each line is subtle, quiet, yet breathtaking in its precision, and the spare eloquence of Brosman’s perfectly executed gestures invests with stunning pathos poems such as “Wind”—which reflects a woman abandoned by husband, children, and faith itself—and “Carnival,” in which a lonely aging woman at Mardi Gras muses. Whether rendering a speaker’s spiritual communion with Mozart, the febrile longings of a woman caught in adultery in French Algeria, or a love letter by Madame d’Epinay (deftly couched in the metrics and tropes of eighteenth-century France), Brosman moves effortlessly from the broodingly intimate perspectives of other eyes, other souls, to the most abstract of aesthetic meditations. These are poems of wit and passion, poems that beg to be read and reread, and this remarkable collection reminds us again and again of the passages that open into the lives of our imagination.

Truly awesome, the Canyon de Chelly National Monument has inspired artists from the first people to inscribe figures on the massive stone to contemporary photographers and painters. Hagerty does a good job of combining informative historical essays, profiles of artists and their methods of representing the canyon, and photographs of the place and the art. The volume captures the poetic spirit of Canyon de Chelly and its power.

These essays on L'Etranger celebrate its continuing influence throughout the world. Contributors come from Algeria, Samoa, India, Russia, France, Britain and the United States. Included are essays by prominent French and English-language authors for whom the novel has been an influential expression of contemporary sensibility. Other essays include feminist interpretations of Meursault, studies of Camus's narrative form, and explorations of the Algerian setting of the novel. Comparative studies show Camus's relation to the New Novel, to Greene and Orwell, to Jules Roy, and to Sartre.

Ekphrasis, the description of pictorial art in words, is the subject of this bibliography. More specifically, some 2500 poems on paintings are catalogued, by type of publication in which they appear and by poet. Also included are 2000 entries on the secondary literature of ekphrasis, including works on sculpture, music, photography, film, and mixed media.