Event Horizon: New and Selected Later Poems

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.

Robert Pack (born May 19, 1929, in New York City) is an American poet and critic, and Distinguished Senior Professor in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana - Missoula. For thirty-four years he taught at Middlebury College and from 1973 to 1995 served as director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and criticism.