The 145 short poems in this volume deal with certain problems concerning human relationships that seem particularly frequent in the western industrialized world at the present time. The volume starts with a collection of 117 poems entitled SURFACE TENSION. Monologues in which the author relates his inner states of emotion to events in Nature are alternated with shorter and more lyrical poems. In the first 'movement' the sea is used to symbolize conflicts between men and women in a partnership. In the second movement, the earth is used to symbolize conflicts within an individual over how far he or she should allow intellectual concerns to win out over romantic concerns (or vice versa). In the third movement, air and sky are used to symbolize the states of relative peace (interspersed with moments of storm) that can arise in a relationship between two people with similar ideals. In the second collection, entitled MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, the unifying undercurrent is the poet's interest in how his own romantic conflicts influence the style and form of the individual poems associated with those conflicts.

Taking Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as its primary subjects, Surface Tension reveals how these later Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Turning to contemporary experimental poets and theorists of poetry, such as Andrew Joron, Lisa Robertson, Christopher Nealon, and Joan Retallack, it goes on to reveal how our own poetry's fascination with complex surfaces and imagined social transformation has deep and under-recognized ties to Victorian concepts. Surface Tension offers new insights into the debt we owe to the most radical of the Victorians while yielding new understandings of how late Victorian poetry, even when least explicitly political, engages, and often re-envisions, the period's pressing anxieties about social progress, decadence, and revolution.

Equi’s poems insist that despite the fact that most of our everyday reality has been rendered accountable and computable, there is still a region of experience that escapes our GPS-mapped consciousness—an intangible realm where poetry is still possible.

Equi's innovative poems whimsically explore the effects of technology on everyday life.

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

Explore the feelings of a man who is like many others: He feels guilty about being attracted to someone other than his wife. It's during these moments that he clamps down on his desires, knowing that it could endanger his marriage and family life. But still, his responsibilities as a parent have him wishing he could escape into the arms of another. Find out how he battles through his urges in this book's first selection of poems, titled "Trepidations." With moving candor, he delves into his moments of mental infidelity to his wife. The poet follows that up with "Celebrations," a second grouping of poems in which he expresses his appreciation to his loving wife. Using a stylistic approach dubbed "cosmopolitan formalism," these poems are meant to appeal to all people, regardless of their gender, sexuality or background. Weed through the tricky problems of a serious relationship and find a love that lasts in Celebrations and Other Poems.

Drawing on the recent focus on spatial imagination in the humanities and social sciences, Poetry and Geography looks at the significance of space, place, and landscape in the works of British and Irish poets, offering interpretations of poems by Roy Fisher, R. S. Thomas, John Burnside, Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott, and many others. Its fourteen essays collectively sketch a series of intersections between language and location, form and environment, and sound and space, exploring poetry's unique capacity to invigorate and expand our spatial vocabularies and the many relationships we have with the world around us.

Written with language that works in harmony with the rhythm of the poems, seasoned poet David J. Murray offers his third collection of work in War-Wise and Other Poems. Presented in two parts, the first set, War-Wise, contains thirty-five poems reflecting Murrays memories of life in Manchester, England, during World War IIa war that began when he was two years old. Emitting clear and powerful imagery, some of the titles are straightforward narrative. Others are more reflective and address the effect the Holocaust had on his eight-year-old mind. In Ghosts, Murray combines the innocence of childhood with the violence of war. In Sunday School, we sometimes drew Pictures whose innocence shone through The spattered lines of gunshot fire That dotted and dashed each page entire Until, on the page, a Messerschmidt Was finally and firmly hit And fell in flames into the blue Of our crayond sea; we drew no crew. The second collection, One Hundred Mood Studies, contains a set of short, stand-alone, rhymed sonnets, each expressing a modern-day emotional conflict. Exercises in the craft of formal writing, these poems provide an outlet for everyday shifts in emotions.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

In recent years, poet David J. Murray formed an unusual connection with a friend, a widow as he is a widower. They began a collaboration in verse, creating collections of poetry together that form a unique and intriguing conversation. Interchange and Other Poems, Murray’s 13th poetry collection and the 3rd in this series, weaves together many different components of life using the thread of interchanging communication to enrich and maintain a mutually acceptable relationship. Language and content combine beautifully as Murray blends concrete detail with abstraction. His mellifluous marriage of the tangible and the universal shows that stable relationships beneath the human experience when well maintained. These verses moves smoothly from one aspect of life to another, from one poem to the next, carried along by the constant undercurrent of the relationship’s recurring repair and renewal.