Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems [Paperback]

PAUL ZIMMER is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Family Reunion, which won an Award for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and The Great Bird of Love, which was selected by William Stafford for the National Poetry Series. He splits his time between a farm in southwestern Wisconsin and a small house in the south of France.

Crossing to Sunlight Revisited offers both a retrospective and a current look at the work of Paul Zimmer. It contains twenty-three poems not included in Zimmer's previous career-spanning work, Crossing to Sunlight, or, as Zimmer writes, "a total of seventy-three poems, one for each of the years I have lived."

When Crossing to Sunlight appeared in 1997, the Gettysburg Review described Zimmer as a poet who "invests language with the vitality of desire" and who "unlike many poets in his generation, has forgone stylistic complacency and continued to explore the possibilities inherent in language."

Being a poet, says Zimmer, is "perhaps the only courageous thing I have done in my life." Here is a generous measure of that courage, of that body of work that once moved Robert Olen Butler to write, "I turn again and again to Zimmer's poetry to remind myself what the essence of all literary art is: the moment."

For the past fifty years Paul Zimmer has been writing poems about violence and cruelty as they appear in the schoolyard, in the daily experience of adults, and in the Nevada desert where he witnessed atomic bomb tests as a G.I. in a foxhole. His mouthpiece character, 'Zimmer' (with his gang of blue-collar cronies), is almost confessional at times, albeit with a grand sense of humor that tempers the bad news and convinces us that evenl³.