Selected Poems

Selected Poems is compiled from the best works in Jean Garrigue's eight published collections. It also includes some uncollected poems drawn from the archive of her manuscripts in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. From its beginning, Garrigue's poetry reveals a remarkable richness and originality of imagery combined with an emotional intensity approaching transcendence. Human love in all its dimensions is a continuing preoccupation of her work, yet her feeling for the natural world, and especially for animals, runs equally deep. Her later work moves outward to wider perspectives on travel, politics, art, and literature itself, while exploring the philosophical questions of permanence and change, the role of the artist in an indifferent world, and the struggle of the spirit with the fact of death. Garrigue's lyrical vein broadens into a long, meditative lyric, often fused with a richly detailed evocation of place, that recalls some of the greatest poems of her Romantic predecessors.