Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems

by Paul Zimmer

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 the moment."

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zimmer is my favorite poet of all time. I liked most of the twenty new poems less than his usual work, which makes up the rest of the book. The only thing better than reading Zimmer is having him read it to you and I did attend one of his readings years back. There are few things that I've enjoyed more.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 Z722c 1996