Poets' First and Last Books in Dialogue

In this close reading designed to discover the primal relationship between a poet's first and last words, Simmons (English, U. of Iowa) juxtaposes the first and last books of seven poets: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Robert Pinsky. The book is not about the biographical implications of beginnings and endings, but rather analyzes how the pairs of texts speak to one another across time, looking at themes such as yeaning, forgiveness, rejection of reality, and home. Annotation Ac2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Thomas Simmons is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 1992. After completing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He has also taught at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. His six previous books include The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood; A Season in the Air: One Man’s Adventures in Flying; Erotic Reckonings: Mastery and Apprenticeship in the Work of Poets and Lovers; Ghost Man: Reflections on Evolution, Love, and Loss; The Burning Child: Essays on Mental Health and Illness; and Imperial Affliction: Eighteenth-Century British Poets and Their Twentieth-Century Lives (Lang, 2010).