Step Lightly [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The book you are holding in your hands started in a shoe box. For years I've copied and clipped and saved poems from newspapers and magazines and books, because they gave me the special kind of pleasure that good poetry gives when it celebrates the ordinary in an unordinary way. This is not an anthology of light verse. Though many of the poems have their own quirky humor, they also have the clarity of a well-lit room, and they move as gracefully and accurately as a cat stepping across a desk crowded with objects. If you read straight through this book, you can start in the morning with Emily Dickinsons "Will there reaUy be a 'Morning'?" In the afternoon you can explore a sunlit garden with Theodore Roethke and converse with William Blake's tiger, Gerald Stern's cows, or Christopher Smart's cat. By the end of the day I hope your head will be spinning with so many memories of your own that you'll need Denise Levertov's "Writing in the Dark" to help you put them on paper. These poems are for anyone who loves the sound of words and the rhythm of language. They are rhymed and unrhymed, traditional and experimental. There is