Poetry. William Witherup's poems are exceptionally rich and diverse in subject matter: work poems, nature poems, poems of love and loss, political comment and satire. The voice is distinctive -- that of a man who has come through, and has welded the beauty and pain of the world to his writings. This volume includes work from Black Ash, Orange Fire: Collected Poems 1959-1985; Men at Work (1989); new poems from the last decade; and translations of Antonio Machado, Vicente Huidobro, and Enrique Lihn. No poet writing today catches the complexity, the valence, the hysteria of being alone, of being up against it, of being driven by forces little understood; this feeling of isolation is Witherup Country, and that well may be the most significant emotion of these past decades -- James B. Hall.