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Elk in Winter

Robert Pack is a narrative master blessed with a keen ear for everyday speech. In poems that recall Robert Frost’s meditative regard of nature, Pack’s newest collection, Elk in Winter, resolves universal questions in the particular, the personal, and the intimate. This rich and varied volume moves from comedy to elegy, from lyric to narrative, in which individual characters are revealed and rendered symbolic by the stories that enclose them. What finally unites the poems of Elk in Winter is Pack’s desire to appeal to the ear as much as to the heart, and to discover and reveal the passionate music of ideas.

Read an excerpt.


136 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 2004

Poetry

Reviews

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Peter Reading | Times Literary Supplement

“Robert Pack is a humane and eloquent poet who follows Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson in a major American tradition. This latest volume by Pack goes beyond all of his previous work. It is mature, deeply seasoned by the courage to surmount suffering, and wonderfully benign in its exaltation of the common life. Like Frost and Robinson, Pack extends the Wordsworthian vision of natural joy and sympathy with the reader.”--Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Elk in Winter is an outstanding collection of poems by one of America’s most distinguished poets. Pack has always been a master of the use of verse forms, and he displays his mastery here. But what is most moving and significant about his collection is its project, which is to find ‘what can connect my sense of me / from where my life has been / to where I’m sitting now.’”--Mark Strand

Mark Strand

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