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Descartes' Loneliness, by Allen Grossman

A new, breakthrough collection by "one of our most disturbing and humanly gifted poets" (Harold Bloom).

Allen Grossman's newest work Descartes' Loneliness blends the comic and tragic. As the writer Ha Jin once wrote, it is "remarkable for the stout spirit of the speaker who dares to be funny while tackling such an austere subject as death." Poems such as "The Famished Dead," where the poet is visited by lost loved ones, "one at a time," confirm Jorie Graham's observation that "from the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry to be heard--Grossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent."

ALLEN GROSSMAN was born in 1932 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Brynner Prize for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He was professor of English at Brandeis University and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University.

Date of publication: December 2007