Poetry. The poetry which comprises SEA GATE meditates on the provisional, fleeting nature of the self. Elegiac and intensely musical, Emerson's poems draw on geology, cosmology, theology, and physics to render visible the complex relationship between spirit and the material world. "Attending to both John Clare and to Emmanuel Levinas, SEA GATE advances gracefully the project of recent American poets who have sought, through poetry, to know this world, this universe, its traces, and living engagements: `And the stellar breeze of a misnamed/ phenomenon can be seen well/ in a nebula's cast-off shroud." Reasserting a dialogue between truth and beauty, Jocelyn Emerson has given us renewed grandeur and consolation"-Bin Ramke.