The first book in a decade from a poet whose blank verse speaks "with the precise qualifications of Henry James, and conveys the muted but implicit drama of Edward Hopper"

-Anthony Hecht "Herbert Morris has no interest in the highly compressed language through which contemporary poetry so often strives for urgency; his tension arises from the tremendous emotional pressure placed upon the search [for] language which will approximate memory's lineaments...the vanished worlds of possibility and of desire. More is always more in his poems...a vast, ravishing architecture of words."

-Mark Doty "Herbert Morris is...so leisurely as he draws the thread through his labyrinthine thought, yet so passionate, so precise and tender....With the force of his love of language, he truly makes it new."

-Lynne Sharon Schwartz In this, his first collection since the acclaimed Little Voices of the Pears, Herbert Morris gathers fifteen recent poems in his two signature modes, the dramatic monologue and the meditative reverie. His subjects include a resplendent apricot gown once worn by Lillian Gish ("Chaplin enthralled, Griffith smitten, ecstatic"); a poignant human detail in Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac; and a host of variations on the Peaceable Kingdom, the obsessive lifework of the painter Edward Hicks. Mr. Morris's blank verse, for decades now a glory of American poetry, here achieves a new level of mastery.