Poetry. This selected volume collects material from Gilfillan's books of poetry up through 1999's Satin Street, and swatches of unpublished work from 1965-2000. Gilfillan's observations, etymologies, riffs on classical and modern forms are constructed by equal parts naturalist and aesthete. He employs a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the literary and visual arts, philosophical treatises, musical forms, the natural world, and the everyday language that gets spoke along rivers. "If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be"--Tom Raworth.

Author City: DENVER, CO USA

Merrill Gilfillan was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, in 1945 and studied literature at the Universities of Michigan and Iowa. His first book of poems appeared in 1970. He currently lives in Colorado.