All the Night Wings: Poems

Dust jacket notes: "When Loren Eiseley wrote W.H. Auden that he was publishing his first book of verse, Auden replied: 'I shall greatly look forward to reading your poems. I know that, whatever else they my be, they are not going to sound like anybody else.' Auden was not disappointed. He thought Notes of an Alchemist 'most moving and very original.' Two other books of poetry followed: The Innocent Assassins, which Auden found 'fascinating reading,' and Another Kind of Autumn. Now, Times Books is proud to published Eiseley's largest collection of verse, which ranges from 'Spiders' (1928) to 'Beware, My Successor,' which he composed just before his death in the summer of 1977. Only a few of these have been published before in a book. They vary from more formal poems to free verse, and show the poet's voice and vision. Had anyone asked Eiseley what his book is about, he would say death, owls, love, foxes, and a number of other things out of my youth, including the prairies and riding freights. For All the Night Wings, like most of his books, is autobiographical. Indeed, the greatness of some of our greatest writers lies in the fact that what they mainly write has a basis in autobiography. This is true of Loren Eiseley. We value the personality that we discern behind his books and that gives them their shape."