Wasps trapped by plate glass, sparrows in winter, “the idiot boy counting his fingers in the laundromat”—animal life and human frailty wake the imagination in this, Lewis Hyde’s first book of poems. Hyde’s themes are the old ones: love and death, work, nature, both the pleasure and the grief of the body. Hyde, a celebrated essayist and translator, is a poet of fresh, distinctive perception.

“One of the nobler functions of poetry is to help the reader with the burden of intense emotion inseparable from meaningful experience. Lewis Hyde’s poems do this, sometimes with wit and playfulness, always with authority and compassion. No reader will easily forget the scenes and moments he has taken from the world and shaped into poems of remarkable strength and humanity.” — Mary Oliver

Published in 1988 by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now out of print; copies often available from online sellers.

Five poems from this collection – PDF
Selected Unpublished Poems – PDF