Or to Begin Again

Ann Lauterbach’s ninth work of poetry, Or to Begin Again, takes its name from a sixteen-poem elegy that resists its own end, as it meditates on the nearness of specific attachment and loss against the mute background of historical forces in times of war. In the center of the book is a twelve-part narrative, Alice in the Wasteland,”inspired by Lewis Carroll’s great character and T.S. Eliot’s 1922 modernist poem. Alice is accosted by an invisible Voice as she wanders and wonders about the nature of language in relation to perception. In this volume, Lauterbach again shows the range of her formal inventiveness, demonstrating the visual dynamics of the page in tandem with the powerful musical cadences and imagery of a contemporary master.

Ann Lauterbach is Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she has also been, since 1991, co-chair of writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts. She is also a visiting core critic at the Yale Graduate School of the Arts. As well as receiving Guggenheim, New York State Foundation for the Arts, and Ingram Merrill Fellowships, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. S he has published eight collections of poems, most recently Hum, as well as a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience.