West of Yesterday, East of Summer

" A selection of poems from a respected poet, written between 1973 and 1993, displays his wide-ranging passions and insights, showing his diversity in their movement from the sublime to the heroic and featuring the poet's reflective notes on the works. Review: Paul Monette began his writing life as a poet. For ten years he worked exclusively in the genre producing The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975) and No Witnesses (1981). Monette then turned to write novels and did not return to poetry until almost a decade later, when AIDS cut down his lover, Roger Horwitz. Sporadically during Roger's 20-month illness, Monette began to experiment with a form that would express the careening anxiety and the overwhelming sense of exile that had engulfed the two men. After Robert died in 1986, Monette wrote a stunning series of elegies for his friend, a monumental and wholly original effusion of the fury and madness of grief."