Passionately lyrical and yet somehow skeptical, formal but unleashed, these ninety-five poems in many cases adopt traditional rhyme schemes but then break, at strategic times, conventions of English. This includes typical Cummings moves such as disrupting words in the middle to comment upon a single syllable, or to create multiple words out of a single word. He has a gift of song, but also brings to the surface the aural associations that take place within words and a general keen awareness of language. In this way he builds on earlier avant-garde work and anticipates the work of the language poets and other current writers.

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