The Collected Poems

The definitive anthology of Reynolds Price's accomplishments in poetry over four decades, The Collected Poems opens with a preface that discusses his beginnings, guides, and methods; it then includes his first three collections in their entirety -- Vital Provisions, The Laws of Ice, and The Use of Fire -- and adds a new volume, The Unaccountable Worth of the World, eighty-five more recent poems that offer striking departures as they continue to embody Price's close attention to the exterior and the interior worlds of a lengthening and unexpectedly complex life.

The Collected Poems reveals, throughout, the accumulated variety of Reynolds Price's years as a poet -- the thematic breadth, formal steadiness, narrative vitality, and intense lyricism that have marked his work from the start. It is a landmark in a creative life that now includes more than thirty books -- poems, novels, plays, essays, translations -- and in the span of contemporary American verse.

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated in the public schools of his native state, he earned an A.B. summa cum laude from Duke University. In 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University to study English literature. After three years and a B.Litt. degree, with a thesis on the poetry of John Milton, he returned to Duke where he continues teaching as James B. Duke Professor of English.

With his novel A Long and Happy Life in 1962, he began a career which has produced numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, translations and memoir. A Long and Happy Life won the William Faulkner Award; Kate Vaiden won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; and his poems have won the Levinson, Blumenthal and Tietjens awards from Poetry.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen languages.