Death is the Place: Poems

Winner of the American Book Award in 1982 for his collected poems, 'Life Supports,' and hailed, by "The Nation," as 'our most significant poet.' William Bronk here offers new poems that range equally over the small and the great of reality.... something that itself is 'always brilliantly true and less than whole.' They are poems sharp and quick enough to fix in the mind, yet with a modulated clemency that lets them echo past their moment.

Often these poems, with their signature nailhead candor, come back to the subject of aging, to the deliciousness of the everyday, especially when threatened by the ultimate hem of death. Yet Bronk never is a poet given over to self-pity; these are mortality-poems with a distinctive buoyancy to them, an expectation that the world at least continues and that in this continuance is a radiance, a suggestion of fair distribution, of hope.