Poetry. FROM MIMIR'S HEAD comprises two reciprocal passes through the same terrain—a sequence of poems mostly exploring ontological matters in a variety of verse inventions, and a series of notes in a prose equally exploratory and inventive. In both, the quickly shifting diction is at once mercurial and immaculate, the images vivid and well-ordered, the structures musical and truly spoken, and the thought, if "philosophical," nonetheless sprung from the recognition of the limits of metaphysical discourse. Stein writes: "The philosopher should be discouraged in his metaphysical pretension, but the metaphysician encouraged in his poetic need."

Author City: BARRYTOWN, NY USA

Charles Stein was born in 1944 in New York City. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including a new verse translation of The Odyssey (North Atlantic Books, 2008), THE HAT RACK TREE: SELECTED POEMS FROM THEFORESTFORTHETREES, 1980-1983 (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1994) and, most recently, FROM MIMIR'S HEAD: POEMS FROM THEFORESTFORTHETREES (1994-2000) (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 2011). His prose writings include Persephone Unveiled (North Atlantic Books, 2006), The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson & His Use of the Writings of C.G. Jung (Barrytown Limited, 1998), and GARY HILL: HAND HEARD/LIMINAL OBJECTS (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1997), a collaborative study with George Quasha of the work of Gary Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Connecticut at Storrs and lives with guitarist, choral director, photographer, and research historian, Megan Hastie in Barrytown, New York.

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