UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Conversations with Contemporary Poets

Book Jacket: "Giving Their Word" edited by S. Ratiner

Edited and with interviews by Steven Ratiner

Distinguished poets reflect on their lives and work

Based on a three-year series of interviews conducted by Steven Ratiner for the Christian Science Monitor, this book offers extended conversations with twelve of today’s most influential poets. Published here in their entirety for the first time, their comments are wonderfully detailed, refreshingly honest, and provide the sort of intimate introduction to both poet and text that readers are rarely privileged to enjoy.

Included are conversations with William Stafford, Mary Oliver, John Montague, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Forché, Martín Espada, Marge Piercy, Rita Dove, and Bei Dao. In the book’s closing piece, Steven Ratiner returns to Donald Hall’s New Hampshire farm to conduct a moving interview shortly before the publication of Hall’s collection Without, which focused on the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon.

"This compilation of conversations serves as a source of biographical information about the writing lives of 13 leading contemporary poets while offering instruction and inspiration to writers of all kinds. Each conversation captivatingly interweaves the life of the poet with the writing process and the creativity that his or her poetry represents. Consider even the chapter titles—William Stafford: Opening the Moment, Carolyn Forché: The Poetry of Witness, and Donald Hall: The Work That Makes a Home—which not only reflect each poet’s body of work but also hint at the superb content of each of the interviews Ratiner (himself a poet) has compiled. Commenting on his interview process with Forché, he notes: ‘The story seemed to just tumble forth, gaining momentum like a river coming down from high ground.’ This could also describe Ratiner’s expert interview process and the publication of this book, which is an absolute pleasure to read. Highly recommended."

Library Journal

"Ratiner is a hugely sympathetic and thoughtful reader, capable of persuading us, through the quality of his attention, that the poets he has chosen are well worth our attention. Surely it is by design that the interviews in this book suggestively reflect the rich color fields of the American Mosaic. . . . ‘Reports from the Frontier’ might be an alternative title to this stimulating and even exhilarating book. One returns from it in much the same state as one does after immersion in a work of art: energized, emboldened, and hungry for more."

Askold Melnyczuk, founding editor of AGNI

Poet and editor Steven Ratiner is the author of several chapbooks and has contributed poetry and prose to numerous magazines in America and abroad.

Poetry / Literary Studies
288 pp., 15 illus.
$37.50s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-357-5
$24.95t paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-441-1
2002 cloth, June 2004 paper
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