A generous gathering of the best poems, both previously published and uncollected, from Rachel Hadas's career. Rachel Hadas brings an acute perception and a rich education to her exquisitely crafted poetry. As James Merrill wrote, Hadas's "honeyed words and bracing forms . . . over and over bring the mind to its senses." Rooted in the domestic and illuminated by Hadas's lifelong engagement with classics, the poems gathered here, many in traditional forms, draw out the relationships between life, love, time and art. This collection will be welcomed by all who love Hadas's strongly etched lines and passionate intelligence.

"Laws is a capacious collection by one of America's most renowned poets.

Indelible is Rachel Hadas's first book since her critically acclaimed Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (1998).

"[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." —Lydia Davis In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of "losing" George. Her narrative begins when George's illness can no longer be ignored, and ends in 2008 soon after his move to a dementia facility (when, after thirty years of marriage, she finds herself no longer living with her husband). Within the cloudy confines of those difficult years, years when reading and writing were an essential part of what kept her going, she "tried to keep track…tried to tell the truth." "If only all doctors and nurses and social workers who care for the chronically ill could read this book. If only patients and family members stricken with such losses could receive what this book can give them. While Strange Relation relates one illness and the life of one family, it is also, poetically, about all illnesses, all families, all struggles, all living. The art achieves the dual life of the universal and the particular, marking it as timeless, making it for us all necessary."—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University "Rachel Hadas's own wonderfully resonant poems, along with the rich collection of verse and prose by other writers that she weaves into her story, clarify and illuminate over and over again this thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness—illness that, as she shows us so well, is at once frighteningly alien and also deeply a part of our unavoidable vulnerability as mortal beings. Beautifully written, totally engrossing, and very sad."—Lydia Davis "Strange Relation is a deeply moving, deeply personal, beautifully written exploration of how the power of grief can be met with the power of literature, and how solace can be found in the space between them."—Frank Huyler "A poignant memoir of love, creativity and human vulnerability. Rachel Hadas brings a poet's incisive eye to the labyrinth of dementia."—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and Singular Intimacies "Like an elegy, Strange Relation is about loss and grief. Like all elegies, it also memorializes and celebrates. Rachel Hadas, in the course of her personal narrative, cites accounts of dementia, in its social and personal meanings."—Robert Pinsky "Brilliant and tough-minded, poignant but clear-headed, Rachel Hadas shines a steady light on her experience as the wife of an accomplished composer who, at a comparatively early age, descended into dementia. Strange Relation never sacrifices truth for easy answers. Instead, Hadas uses literature to chart a course through wrenching complexities. This lauded and exceptional poet shows how language itself, the very thing her husband loses, became her shield as she crossed the ravaged lands of decision-making, making new discoveries, new friends, and new sense of the world. Strange Relation snaps with bravery, intelligence, and Hadas' tart, candid wisdom."—Molly Peacock "Strange Relation is a beautifully written and piercingly honest account of life with a brilliant man as he descends into dementia, in his sixties."—Reeve Lindbergh

Rachel Hadas's The Empty Bed takes an unflinching look at the loss of friends to AIDS and cancer, and commemorates the despair and rage of those left to grieve for the dead. Between 1991 and 1993, five of the poets with whom Hadas had worked at Gay Men's Health Crisis died, and in the midst of these deaths came that of the poet's mother. Written with the energy of desperation, the central section of The Empty Bed is devoted to a series of elegies -- private but also public laments almost secretly empowered by their formal schemes. The elegies are embraced by preparatory meditations on boundaries and thresholds; wise and passionate, these poems celebrate the consolations of friendship and of art. The collection is infused with a growing certainty that although the emptiness left by the deaths of loved ones can never be filled, it can be haloed and commemorated, and in that sense mitigated, by language.

This is the fourteenth volume from Between The Lines, and it marks an interesting departure from the previous thirteen, featuring as it does three poets, not just one, each of whom is rather younger than the poets appearing in the earlier books. Though younger each has a claim to being called "senior," having a long list of highly regarded publications behind them, and a number of coveted honors and awards to his/her name. The three poets have been questioned at length about their life and their work by three distinguished poet-critics: Clive Wilmer, Isaac Cates, and Cynthia Haven. Their carefully meditated responses will be helpful to the general reader and the specialist alike. The three poets interviewed are Tim Steele, who teaches at California State University, Dick Davis, who teaches at Ohio State University, and Rachel Hadas, who teaches at Rutgers University.

A fresh collection of poetry that explores dreaming and waking.

A central theme of The Golden Road is the prolonged dementia of the poet’s husband. But Rachel Hadas’s new collection sets the loneliness of progressive loss in the context of the continuities that sustain her: reading, writing, and memory; familiar places; and the rich texture of a life fully lived. These poems are meticulously observed, nimble in their deployment of a range of forms, and capacious in their range of reference. They take us to a Greek island, to Carl Schurz Park in New York City, to an old house in Vermont, to a performance of Macbeth, and to the neurology floor of a hospital. Hadas finds beauty in all those places. The Golden Road laments, but it also celebrates.

The poems in Rachel Hadas's new book are united by a common preoccupation with passage--passage variously construed. In Section I, the four seasons are glimpsed in turn through the lenses of several types of personal associations, especially parenthood. As spring gives way to fall and winter, separation looms; diverse kinds of temporary and permanent renewal come with spring, and the fifth poem in this section steps outside this cycle. In Section II, the phrase "pass it on" recalls the game "telephone," in which a word is whispered by one speaker to another. Here the poems focus on tradition, primarily as it is transmitted through teaching, but also through art and again parenthood. Thoughts on teaching specific texts (the Iliad, Dickinson's poems, Sophocles' Philoctetes) alternate with more personal moments of contemplation. Finally, in Section III "pass it on" comes to signify transition--whether between spring and summer, city and country, youth and age, presence and absence, or life and death. From "Three Silences": Of all the times when not to speak is best, mother's and infant's is the easiest, the milky mouth still warm against her breast. Before a single year has passed, he's well along the way: language has cast its spell. Each thing he sees now has a tale to tell. A wide expanse of water-cean. Look! Next time, it seems that water is a brook. The world's loose leaves, bound up into a book. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A varied and generous sampling of more than a decade's worth of prose by an important poet