The Various Light

In these new poems, characteristically combining narrative ease with crystalline intensity, Alfred Corn takes up new subjects and shows new capacities in developing them. Moving from the largely urban setting of his previous work, he responds to the regenerative power of landscape, American and European, in several lights, and explores those states of mind in which we are most ourselves: dream, meditation, lyric, memorial. Throughout the volume there is an uncanny balance between states of mind and things as they are, a balance that accounts for Corn's powers as both a psychological and a descriptive poet. By the various lights of Alfred Corn's poetry, we can glimpse the world as a whole. "Alfred Corn has enormous resources at work in his poems: wit, strength, sureness of touch...a fabric of poetry wonderfully original, generous, warm, and animated." -Anthony Hecht