This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' - Publishers Weekly (starred review) Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once. - Grace Schulman, The Nation Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it. - C. K. Williams