Starting from Sleep: New & Selected Poems (Sewanee Writers' Series)

Richly inventive new poems accompany a generous selection from Charles Martin's three earlier collections in this latest volume of the acclaimed Sewanee Writers' Series. A poet of formal brilliance and a darkly comic sensibility, two-time Pulitzer Prize- nominee Charles Martin has, over three decades of creativity, produced a most unusual collection of poems; the forms are traditional but the concerns are as contemporary as TV's Jeopardy, lingerie from Victoria's Secret, or leftover ICBMs. "Deft, witty, intelligent and richly colloquial, this is poetry of technical mastery and an easy freedom based on well-earned assurance," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Anthony Hecht.

Renowned for his translations of Catullus and Ovid, Martin's subjects are delightfully unpredictable: John Coltrane rubs shoulders with Petronius; a family of loquacious mice philosophizes about mortality; and Robinson Crusoe's Friday and Lot's wife both have their say. Mourned are the "disappeared" of Guatemala, as well as a beloved uncle whose brutal murder lay shrouded in the family's silence. From New York's Bowery to an artists' colony in California to the landscape of Vermont, Martin finds "the legends of the heart's lust for joy and violence."