I am grateful to The Whiting Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council for fellowships that supported the writing of this volume; and to the Center for Advanced Study, the English Department, and the Research Board at the University of Illinois for their generous support. Many many thanks also to my patient friends and family—Huck, Maria, Mack, Billy, Marcia, Max, Norma, Deborah, Joy, Marianne, Michael, John, Paul, C. Dale, and Father Ray— to my editors at BOA—Thorn Ward and Steve Huff—and to my wonderful students. A special thanks to the Stonington Village Improvement Association and the late James Merrill for the invaluable experience afforded me by a residency at the James Merrill house in Stonington, Connecticut.

About the Author

Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her first volume of poetry, To the Place of Trumpets, was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1987 and published by Yale University Press the following year. Her second book, Song, published by BOA Editions, Ltd., was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies and she has been awarded many prizes and fellowships, including a Whiting Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Witter Bynner Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

BOA EDITIONS, LTD.

AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES

No. 1       The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress
W. D. Snodgrass

No. 2       She
M. L. Rosenthal

No. 3       Living With Distance
Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

No. 4       Not Just Any Death
Michael Waters

No. 5       That Was Then: New and Selected Poems
Isabella Gardner

No. 6       Things That Happen Where There Aren’t Any People
William Stafford

No. 7       The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980
John Logan

No. 8       Signatures
Joseph Stroud

No. 9       People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983
Louis Simpson

No. 10     Yin
Carolyn Kizer

No. 11     Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada
Bill Tremblay

No. 12     Seeing It Was So
Anthony Piccione

No. 13     Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems

No. 14     Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980
Lucille Clifton

No. 15     Next: New Poems
Lucille Clifton

No. 16     Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family
William B. Patrick

No. 17     John Logan: The Collected Poems

No. 18     Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems

No. 19     The Sunken Lightship
Peter Makuck

No. 20     The City in Which I Love You
Li-Young Lee

No. 21     Quilting: Poems 1987–1990
Lucille Clifton

No. 22     John Logan: The Collected Fiction

No. 23     Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays
Delmore Schwartz

No. 24     Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard
Gerald Costanzo

No. 25     The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems
Barton Sutter

No. 26     Each in His Season
W. D. Snodgrass

No. 27     Wordworks: Poems Selected and New
Richard Kostelanetz

No. 28     What We Carry
Dorianne Laux

No. 29     Red Suitcase
Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 30     Song
Brigit Pegeen Kelly

No. 31     The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle
W. D. Snodgrass

No. 32     For the Kingdom
Anthony Piccione

No. 33     The Quicken Tree
Bill Knott

No. 34     These Upraised Hands
William B. Patrick