Böcker av Allen Grossman

'A book of poems should have exactly the same fullness and risk and lay itself open to the same judgment as a life, ' says Allen Grossman. Of the Great House, which includes sections of 'A Harlot's Hire' (1961), Grossman's first published book, as well as his most recent poetry, presents an anatomy of the poet's working life.

A series of poems traces the course of a love affair from both the man's and the woman's point of view.

This combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-across generations-of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure."

In addition to substantial new work, Allen Grossman in The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected 1979-1991 gives his readers a retrospective of a life in poetry that has brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Ether Dome is his seventh book of poems.

In the spirit of Blake's vow of 'mental fight,' this work contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno's maxim 'No poetry after Auschwitz,' to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself.