New and Selected Poems 1930-1990

This short collection contains a sampling of better-known work plus 11 hitherto unpublished poems by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Quintessential Eberhart, the poetry here is uneven in quality yet entirely constant thematically: the material world shackled by suffering and impending decay, and the realm of the imagination that lets the spirit soar to godly heights. Eberhart's poetry, too, follows these dips and turns--vigorously sophisticated in ``The Haystack,'' simply naive in ``The Illusion of Eternity.'' As if afraid that his imagination would be frozen by craft, in ``The Angels'' he says, ``But what would I do with a stiff, marble, non-creature / So resolutely sub and super human, so final, / So far away from my desires and aspirations.'' He feels more comfortable with such creatures as insects, birds and groundhogs, animate yet bound by the earth. In ``Ospreys in Cry,'' he watched ``prey / Caught under water in talons,'' and ``felt a staggering sense / Of the victor and of the doomed . . . / Of being both at one time.'' Eberhart ( Collected Poems: 1930-1986 ) remains a poet of ``wild lament.'' (Dec.)