Collected Poems

Now in paperback, the stunning lifework of this beloved prize-winning poet, gathered in one volume, covering sixty years of poetry, from 1956 to 2016.

This celebratory volume covers nearly all of Marie Ponsot's published work, from True Minds (published in 1956 as number five in the famous Pocket Poets series from City Lights press) through Easy (2009), her most recent collection; and it also includes some work written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot's gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the "hand-span skill" that is the poem. Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot's sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we've never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience "language as the primitive dialect of our human race," as she has described it--to gratefully enter a state that is "what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention."

MARIE PONSOT, the winner of Poetry magazine's Ruth Lily Prize for lifetime achievement, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, was born in 1921. She is the author of six previous collections, including The Bird Catcher, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. A professor emerita of English at Queens College, CUNY, she also taught at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, the New School University, and Beijing University. Ponsot, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014, lives in New York City.