Debora Greger is the author of eight previous books of poems. She has won, among other honors, the Grolier Prize, the Discovery/The Nation Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Florida and in Cambridge, England.
The poems in Debora Greger’s new book journey from Florida to England to Venice, finding in the byways and accidents of travel the ghostly presences that mark the poet’s passage from youth half-forgotten to the edge of old age: the younger self that, like some heroine in Henry James, she catches glimpses of and barely recognizes; the long-dead poets unable to sleep, with things still on their mind. The elegies threaded through this mature, startling book recognize life moving toward the shadows—these are poems of old responsibilities and new virtues, looking back as a way of looking forward.
Praise for Debora Greger:
"An exemplary Greger poem occurs to the ear as a striking painting does to the eye: the particulars of its composition emerge only after the first thrill of the whole."
—The Harvard Review
"Greger's poems are like the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts: one's attention drifts from the text itself to the spectral arabesques, the gold-leaf aura."
—Poetry
Penguin Books
