This volume showcases the life work of someone whom X.J. Kennedy has called "a major poet, commanding in his mastery." Jonathan Aldrich excels in both lyric and narrative modes. His earliest poems from the 1960s and '70s seem fresh today. At the start, his voice was authoritative, lively, and unpretentious, his language both sensual and thoughtful. Aldrich's later poetry deepens his style and continues his engagement with themes such as the meaning of time and our responsibility to the past. This "collected poems" reprints in full the sequence of detective narratives,
Wade's Wait
, along with generous selections from other books, including his extended lyrical sequence
The Ring Road
. It also gives us two long poems for the first time:
Tivoli
and
Owed to Finnegans Wake
. The final section, "New and Selected," draws mainly from his last books and unpublished late poems, poetry that reveals a writer involved in the lives of family and friends, generally hopeful, but sometimes reflecting on the fragility of our human world.