This volume collects approximately 250 poems, selected and thematically reorganized from the poet's highly acclaimed first five books. Here are poems evoking landscapes from the Gulf of Mexico to La Push, heartscapes inhabited by day-laborers, waitresses, bikers,rioters, philologists, weight-lifters and magicians (men and women old and young, black, white, Native American); and here too are evocations exploring what's it's like to have been a son, and to be a father. All are performed on a keyboard ranging from the resonant bass notes of despair to the ringing upper registers of ecstasy and uncut joy. Whether Root is writing deeply personal or mythic poems, what emerges from the collection, whole and entire, has all the power, daring and beauty of an individual vision.

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This volume represents almost 250 poems from Root's first five books. Although their subjects vary widely, the poems are united by acute observation of and deep compassion for the world and its inhabitants. Root plunges headlong into sad events, such as the death of his father, finding beauty even in the darkness: of holding his mother's hand as a small boy at the funeral, he says, "Her grip tightened / and trembled as her rings cut our flesh / and blood came to the edges / of the stones." With gentle power, Root shows us the simple grace of the kind of minute details that surround us all. Elizabeth Gunderson

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Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom: The First Five Books

Root, William Pitt

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