This slim volume is an innovative, thought-provoking, encouragement of the art and joy of reading poems. Its author is an internationally well-known psychopharmacologist who, at age eighty-two, revisits seventy-six poems derived from his personal and professional life, beginning at age fifty. The book opens by exploring the metaphor behind the title, the way in which words in poems mirror clothes in couture—each covering yet enhancing and revealing what lies beneath. In a preparatory exercise, this metaphor is expressed in four poetic forms—haiku, sonnet, classical, and free form—each examined to establish the sources of impact on the aesthetics, emotion, and intellect of the reader. The principles established are then applied by the reader, with the guidance of the author, to explore each of several poems in eight areas of life: introspection, humor and satire, travel and places, life and leisure, mental health matters, spiritual dimensions, age, and infirmity. The reader explores each poem with regard to form, posture on the page, imagery, metaphor, aesthetics, and structure, including syntax, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition. In total, this emphasizes the pithy way in which poetry can best prose in elegance, beauty, and brevity. In addition to sharing and enhancing the joy of reading poems, this includes an amateur’s effort to reverse the well-documented dwindling interest of people in the genre, perhaps contributed to by the increasingly esoteric, abstract, and obscure nature of contemporary poems.

Stephen Berg is one of the most original, passionate and vital American poets of his generation. This selection - his first book to be published in Britain - includes work from The Daughters (1971), Grief (1975), With Akhmatova at the Black gates (1981) and In It (1986), as well as new poems, a selection from a work-in-progress, Shaving, and his masterly long work, Homage to the Afterlife.

New & Selected poems by Ben Greer

Think of a world without problems, without cares, without...well...shoes! Have you ever stomped through leftover paper like a monster or plunged your feet into a chilly sleeping bag while camping? Maybe you've put your soles up against a Jacuzzi jet or found funny marks when you pulled off your socks. If so, you'll find company in this collection of musings about the beauties of being barefoot. In twenty-six poems, Stefi Weisburd explores where we go, what we feel, and what shouldn't be underfoot when our feet are at their freest. Lori McElrath-Eslick adds color to these contemplations with lively watercolor illustrations.