Collected here are sixteen essays on poets and poetry, the writing life, and a host of fascinating topics that come into the wide range of Marianne Boruchs attention. She examines how the imagination works with mystery and surprise in a variety of poets from Elizabeth Bishop to Theodore Roethke, from Russell Edson to Larry Levis, from Walt Whitman to Eavan Boland. Combining a richly associative personal style with original insights on poetic texts and historical and cultural musing, Boruch considers how the atomic bomb changed William Carlos Williamss deepest ambition for poetry, and how Edisons listening, through his famous deafness, informs our sense of the poetic line. Other essays explore how the carits danger and solitudehelps us understand American poetry or how Dvorak and Whitman shared darker things than their curious love for trains. Poetry transforms, changing over time in the work of individual poets as well as changing us as we read it or write it.Boruchs writing has a musical, incantatory style, creating a mood in which many of her subjects are immersed. Her approach isnt meant to fix or crystallize her ideas in any hard and fast light, but rather to present the music of her thinking.