Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues

Robert Pack's new volume of poetry, Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husband and wife; doctor and patient; lawyer and client. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. All possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant others, including pet monkeys and ghosts.

Among Robert Pack's eighteen books of poetry, his most recent collections are: Elk in Winter (2004), Rounding It Out (1999), Minding the Sun (1996), and Fathering the Map: New and Selected Later Poems (1993), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Pack's poetry focuses on such major themes as man's relationship to nature, and human intimacy-friendships and family relationships. His most recent book of criticism, Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost, was published in 1993 by the New England University Press, a study of Frost in the tradition of nature poetry. Pack's earlier collections of essays, The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft and Affirming Limits were published by the University of Massachusetts Press.