Robert Pack

Keeping Watch

Nothing But Light

Jay Parini

Eight-three poets forge a vision of nature for the post-industrial age.

Contemporary American Nature Poetry

Poems for a Small Planet

Home from the Cemetery

Donald Hall

New Poets of England and America: Second Selection

New and Selected Poems

Waking to My Name

New Poets of England and America. Second Selection. English Poets Edited by Donald Hall. American Poets Edited by Robert Pack. (Second Printing.).

Experience New England's landscape and seasons, its cities and towns, its history and people, with 58 poets as your guide.

Contemporary Poetry of New England

What an extraordinary gift Robert Pack, who has blessed us with poems for the past sixty-five years, has given us in this, his most recent volume! Where to begin? Let's begin with the strange, even unsettling title of Pack's new volume: Event Horizon. It's an astronomical term, it turns out, and signifies 'a theoretical boundary around a black hole beyond which no light or other radiation can escape.' In other words, a point of no return. And there you have it, Pack at his canniest, most quizzical, most plangent, and at the same time comic. And make no mistake: these poems will bear all those resonances and radiations out.

Event Horizon: New and Selected Poems

Accompanying CD includes the monologues, read by Robert Pack and Pamela White Hadas, recorded at the University of Montana, KUFM-FM, Montana Public Radio, Missoula, Montana, June 2005.

A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues

Composing Voices

New Poets of England and America

A Packet for Professor Pagels

Before it Vanishes

on Hart Crane. (Phonotape).

GWP is honored to publish a new collection of poems from Robert Pack, entitled All One Breath, whose underlying theme is humankind's kinship with the other inhabitants of the Earth. The poems address the grim vision of how our irresponsible actions have endangered this fragile home planet; however, they also celebrate with their sheer exuberance and lyricism how the imagination can still save us with humor, insight, and tender regard for what endures. This distinguished poet has never been more compelling, more comfortably authoritative in his poetic line, more precise as an observer, or indeed more wise.

All One Breath

"And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story." - William Shakespeare "This book is intended for the reader and theater-goer who loves Shakespeare's plays and enjoys contemplating them in their complexity: the richness of metaphorical language, the characters' psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical implications of the plays as organic dramatic entities that testify to the nature of human limitation and human freedom. I assume that the reader has the patience to delight in the minute details of Shakespeare's patterns of imagery as well as to admire the overall structure of the plays. What most interests me is how these plays cohere and how they can be read from different perspectives which nevertheless complement each other. Thus, I have not adopted any single critical approach, but have responded to each play's individual identity with what seem to me appropriate and fruitful interpretative points of view. Blessed in having been enfranchised by my profession to teach Shakespeare for half a century, I wish to share with my readers the humane vision I find everywhere in Shakespeare's incomparable plays - a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by his acute awareness of human frailty, which has immeasurably enriched my own life." - Author's Note to the Reader

Volition & Storytelling in Shakespeare's Major Plays

Willing to Choose

Robert Pack is a narrative master blessed with a keen ear for everyday speech. In poems that recall Robert Frost's meditative regard of nature, Pack's newest collection, Elk in Winter, resolves universal questions in the particular, the personal, and the intimate. This rich and varied volume moves from comedy to elegy, from lyric to narrative, in which individual characters are revealed and rendered symbolic by the stories that enclose them. What finally unites the poems of Elk in Winter is Pack's desire to appeal to the ear as much as to the heart, and to discover and reveal the passionate music of ideas.

Elk in Winter

Robert Pack is a poet, critic, and director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In this volume he offers 20 essays on the craft of writing and the nature of lyric poetry. He pays homage to those master poets whose high achievements have inspired his own work, and he reflects on human mortality and the consolations that help us to survive - the related pleasures of poetry, laughter, and music.

Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft

The Long View

One of America’s most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, Laughter Before Sleep, Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music. Laughter Before Sleep weighs the nature of endings from the perspective of old age and embraces the humor and play of memory that keep mortality at bay.As we are carried along with Pack’s lyrical, sensitive, and intelligent verse, he takes us on a moving but often comic journey toward the end of life. In the opening section, Pack composes poems that meditate upon a sense of his own diminishing and the meaning of absences. The middle sections form episodes of a memoir in verse, moving from family to history and back again, reflecting on the power of anecdote to shape a life in retrospect. With the final section, Pack recalls his unfulfilled plan to raise penguins in Montana, offers a panegyric on Darwin’s nose, and makes the mistake of trying to impress a police officer with a book of poems. Filled with charm and wit but also with philosophical melancholy, Laughter Before Sleep is a superb addition to the poet’s oeuvre.

Laughter Before Sleep

A sequence of poems revolving around Clayfeld, a sculptor and comic everyman, celebrating the triumphs and losses of life.

Robert Pack

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