Telescope: Selected Poems

For over fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. A poet who digs in and thinks hard, a poet who, in the tradition of George Oppen, makes the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, Heller is a writer who returns again and again to his major themes the better to rethink them anew. Those themes include the political and natural worlds and the responsibility and the freedom of the poet, and Heller often explores them through encounters with key figures in literature and art, such as the painter Max Beckmann and Walter Benjamin. A Jewish poet, a Buddhist poet, a profoundly reflective poet, a deeply sensual poet, Michael Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.