On a Stair (Poets, Penguin)

Ann Lauterbach's fifth collection takes its title from Emerson's great essay, Experience: "Where do we find ourselves?" he asks. Lauterbach's stair sits precariously between a quest for spiritual vitality and a sense of the overwhelming materiality of our world. Identifying with the clown, the nomad and the thief figures whose ghostly marginality haunt this book, Lauterbach brings us, with a dazzling range of formal and imagistic resources, to a new understanding of how language inscribes the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning.