A compelling collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry.

Poetry and Ambition -- An Interview with David Hamilton -- Text as Test -- Public Performance/Private Art -- About "Names of Horses" -- Another Island -- Naming the Skin -- Poetry Notebook -- Pound's Sounds -- William Carlos Williams and the Visual -- Theory X Theory -- Infinity and Tuesday -- The Hardened Reviewer -- Pythagoras, Form, and Free Verse -- Deprivation's Laureate -- Philip Larkin, 1922-85 -- The Way to Say Pleasure -- Two Hundred Years -- Working Journal.