Annie Dillard's collection of twenty-four poems, TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL was first published in 1974, the same year Dillard published her Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-known work, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK. In the thirty years since, she has written nonfiction narratives (HOLY THE FIRM, LIVING BY FICTION, TEACHING A STONE TO TALK, THE WRITING LIFE, FOR THE TIME BEING), a memoir (AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD), and a novel (THE LIVING). By reissuing Dillard's long-out-of-print TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL, Wesleyan University Press has allowed many grateful readers to finally complete their Annie Dillard collections.

TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL confirms that Dillard is a poet at heart. In her poetry, like most of her later work, Dillard explores science, nature, time, and theology. Her poetry is related thematically to PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK in that both books attempt to answer Thoreau's question, "With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?" Whereas we find the speaker of title poem "looking for someone who knows how to pray" (p. 50)--"Who will teach us to pray, who will pray for us now," he ponders (p. 53)--we find Dillard asking the same question in her most recent book, FOR THE TIME BEING (1999). From her first book to her last, Dillard's answer remains the same, "God teaches us to pray" (p. 60). "He has no edges," Dillard observes, "and the holes in him spin./ He alone is real,/ and all things lie in him/ as fossil shells/ curl in solid shale" (p. 61).

TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL offers both short, accessible poems ("The Clearing," "Day at the Office," "Puppy in Deep Snow") and longer, more challenging poetic meditations ("Feast Days," "Bivouac," "Tickets for a Prayer Wheel"). Wesleyan's reissue also includes an excellent Foreward by Michael Collier.

G. Merritt

Annie Dillard's Tickets For A Prayer Wheel is an impressive and highly recommended collection of lucid poetry, elegantly written in free verse, concerning the mundane, the natural, and the mystical. Matter-of-fact narrative gives way to descriptive elegance of brevity in this inspirational work. Deciduous trees/have dominion. But look on bark;/molds make fruiting bodies/out of air. Winner/take all. Grab/a handle. Earth/rolls down like dolphins dive,/headlong to dark.

Very strange stuff is contained in this hard to find book. Annie Dillard is famous for her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek novel. However, I enjoyed this earlier work much more than anything else I have read by her. The poems range from thought provoking, to totally off the wall. Hardly a one of the poems are short of enjoyable. The title poem is worthy of its place on the cover, it struck a chord with me immediately.

Jamie

This is a great book on the geology of the Denali National Park area and highly recommended. It is available and still in print; if you'd like a copy contact the Alaska Natural History Association to purchase one. The Denali branch would be the most expedient.

The geology of the Denali area is a fascinating mix where uplift from plate techtonics meet sharp glacially cut peaks. Mike Collier's book is the only one available for this area; and no, it is not out of print!

Elegantly written by Eileen Cameron, Canyon is a an especially beautiful picturebook designed for young beginning readers, and features Michael Collier's breathtaking photography of America's Grand Canyon. Cameron's simple, poetic, evocative thoughts are in completely in tune with the Grand Canyon's timeless natural splendor. A wondrous picturebook for young folks, with stunning photographs sure to cause readers of all ages to sit up and take notice, Canyon is very highly recommended for both school and community library picturebook collections for early readers.

Michael Collier's debut book of poetry is subtle, understated, and passionate.

"White Bass" is a fabulous poem in which the speaker grieves the loss of his dying father ("to see if my father swims by."). The language in this poem is almost excruciatingly (and therefore ecstatically) tense, and leads to a wholeness of being, and of feeling.

Another favorite of mine is "Mescal," in which the speaker is intoxicated, and begins to see the two fighters on the label of his bottle of booze, fall into one another's arms. This poem touches that place in all of us that's "waited years and years to be touched."

"The Daughters of Degas" is a brilliant poem about a speaker who is the youngest sibling and the only male sibling, with sisters. This poem is about learning the importance and the revery of the interaction between males and females. The speaker notes his sisters going off to school, clutching books, tucking in blouses, and how air swirls around them, and perfumes swirl around them. The end of the poem has the speaker falling into a bed that belongs to one of his sisters, and inhaling the perfumes of their departure. The poem is also about how it is important for all males (especially heterosexual males) to own the feminine parts of themselves. By implication, it is about the importance of females (especially heterosexual females) to own the masculine parts of themselves. But this is never addressed directly, and is not the core of the poem, nor should it be.

This is a book of lucid intelligence and vision, and it is a book full of circular and spherical shapes, shapes a clasp would make. It is a beautiful series of circles, which form a poetic embrace.

I highly recommend this book to everybody.

Collier's second collection is the most somber of the four total collections he's put out to date. This book is about loss- what we lose along the way, sometimes without realizing we've lost anything, as we plod our way through the mazes and intricacies of life. I deeply admire this fine collection, even though it is my least favorite (as an entire collection) of all of Collier's collections. This book is about consolation, too. How do we come to realize what we lose along the way, grieve the losses, and console ourselves with what we're left with? Clearly, it can be done. Collier helps us do it in "The Folded Heart."

An early poem called "Skimming," sets the tone. It shows us a teenage boy speaker, who only knows his neighbors by the sounds they make in their swimming pool at night, and by the dead things he finds floating in the pool when he cleans it. The poem ends exquisitely by concluding, in effect, that it was all "nothing more / than blue shadow on blue shadow."

Isn't that a sad truth? Isn't it beautiful and healing to pay attention to it? And to grieve it?

Other favorite poems of mine in the book include "North Corridor," which is a powerfully compressed series of tercets about the physical perils of life and childhood, and how we're invariably drawn to them, and "Feedback," which is a glorious transportation of an adolescent soul through a process of self-discovery, and a celebration of relatively youthful innocence.

The book ends with "The Cave," which is a brilliantly rendered kaleidescope of thoughts and images, all about our tendency to seek perfection, our obsession to seek perfection, even in things and events that are long past, and therefore obviously imperfect. How does it change us when we judge ourselves, people close to us, or other people, places, and things, against an obviously hopeless and exasperating standard of perfection? Why do we consistently do it?

This book is very somber, powerful, and marvelous in its depth, all at once. I highly recommend it.

Michael Collier's fourth book of poems shows us, with clear-eyed honesty, how we negotiate, survive, and live in our multi-faceted, perilous world(s).

A master of understatement, and detail accurately rendered, Collier leaves us,in "The Hammer" grieving the wounds of fathers and sons, but also appreciating the completeness, the perfection via inscrutability, and unchangingness, of a lie a son has told to his father, which has become, (ironically and powerfully) "incorruptible."

The somber, quiet majesty that reigns all through this collection is immediately rendered in "Argos" which is the opening poem, and which sets the stage for us, as readers, to grieve, to weep "more deeply," to appreciate, to savor and experience Collier's vision and multi-layered insights which make his latest offering a resonant, marvelous, true being.

You probably haven't heard of any of the poets collected in this exciting anthology. That's okay. They publish their poems in little literary journals and their books are mostly published by obscure presses. Most of these poets haven't published more than one book. I'm pretty familiar with contemporary poetry, but the majority of the writers collected here were unknown names to me.

Now I know their names, and better than that, I know their poems. My life is fuller, and I'm grateful to Michael Collier for creating such a diverse and vibrant collection. There is truly something for just about everyone here, from the lover of the bizarre and experimental to the traditionalist yearning for poets who know what meter is (there's not much rhyming, though).

Where do you start with a book like this? You could just dip in somewhere at random and see what you find; with this collection, you're probably going to pull out a moment of wonder no matter which page you flip to. If you've got to start somewhere, check out Olena Kalytiak Davis -- she's one of the most amazing poets alive, I think, and Collier has collected some brilliant recent work which didn't make it into her book And Her Soul Out of Nothing. But maybe you prefer something a little less daring for your first try -- check out the amusing, thought-provoking poems by Roger Fanning, written with perfectly accessible diction and syntax. You'd certainly like the poems by Richard Blanco, for I've shown his work to a number of very different people, all of whom liked it very much. If you want something which makes you feel like you're really reading cutting-edge poetry, check out D.A. Powell -- you'll have to hold the book sideways to read his poems. Don't miss Nick Flynn's "Bag of Mice" or Adrienne Su's "I Can't Become a Buddhist", or Campbell McGrath's wonderful "Capitalist Poem #36", which begins, "We've got this cheese down here to give away,/ tens of thousands of pounds of cheese."

The New American Poets was published in celebration of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference's 75th anniversary, and I can't think of a better tribute to the conference which has played such an important role in the lives of many of the greatest poets in the U.S. than this anthology, a wonderful gift to all readers of poetry.

This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. I wish they would have given details on the printing process for this book. I've never seen such vibrant, sharp, photographs in a book. They look almost as good as professionally done prints on photographic paper. As for the artistic merit of the photographs themselves, they are wonderful, something to get lost in.

Nice book. Fast reading. Excellent pictures. This book really hits home for Californians. Decent explanation of how the earth is moving.

Michael Collier has beautifully written and photographed the geological history of the San Andreas Fault. In what COULD have been an extremely dry subject he has captured my imagination with the most gorgeous photos and his plain-speaking explanations of geology. It's literally a page turner, too, with the flip-page diagram, showing the movement of the tectonic plates. A beautiful book worthy of the coffee table and a wonderful addition to my reference library.

After reading Collier's "Longest Day" I really expected a better story from him. His previous novel is very well written and enjoyable. This one, however, is just dull. The bad guys seem to be without a real motive, as if they're being evil just because they like evil, and the leader talks like a cheesy Bond villain. He also gets his Crowley lore all wrong, as if Collier just heard a few quotes from the man (perhaps in USENet posters' sig files?) and decided to use them as bad-guy dialogue without actually finding the quotes in their original context. Fitz is an interesting character, but only seems to irritate the Doctor and Sam, and has no credible reason to tag along with them at the end (that's not really a spoiler, since the book is billed as the introduction of Fitz, the new companion). In all, if it weren't for the introduction of Fitz, I'd recommend skipping this one in the series. But if you need to see each companon in their first appearance, go ahead and get it. It's not nearly as bad as "The Eight Doctors."

The pacing in THE TAINT is so much more even than in THE LONGEST DAY that it is difficult to believe that they were written by the same author. Where Michael Collier's debut novel had plodding sequences that stretched on and on into nothingness, his follow-up consists of many short and snappy scenes, each giving way to the next before they outstay their welcomeness. Unfortunately, while the story may flow better, we find that the plot contained within isn't all that much more interesting.

It should be no surprise to anyone that this story introduces a new companion to the Doctor's traveling crew. Throughout the entire book Fitz Kreiner is a breath of fresh air, not only for a relatively lackluster story, but also for a book series that was in danger of stalling on account of its two fairly unappealing central characters. He seems real and human in a way that the alien Doctor can't be and the no-dimensional Sam isn't.

The storyline is not terribly complicated. There's a spooky, old house inhabited by several mental patients who all believe that they are being possessed by the devil. There's a meddling psychiatrist who wishes to discover the common characteristic that binds them all together. Into this mix lands the Doctor who, of course, manages to get himself entangled in the situation almost immediately and discovers that the patients aren't actually being controlled by Satan (though we never really expected that they would be), but are in fact an off-shoot of an alien engaged in a war against a long-forgotten enemy. The story isn't terribly bad, nor is it overly engaging. In a similarity to ALIEN BODIES, each of the patients have part of their past story told in their own separate flashback chapter. These sections are by far the most interesting portions of the story. We are shown how their disability has affected them throughout their existence. It's very appealing writing and it's miles better than rest of the stuff in between. Unfortunately, very little of this wonderful character development makes its way back from the flashbacks into the main portion of the story. The individuals of the flashbacks are people with fears, insecurities, pains and stories. The patients of the main story are bland, faceless and easy for the reader to confuse.

Although I've spent most of the space here complaining about the books faults, I will be looking forward to Collier's next book. There aren't any major flaws present and it is a definite improvement over his previous work. If his next offering is as improved, then it should certainly be worth reading.

this is a great story for the doctor's new companion Fitz Kriener. it takes place in the 1960's in a weird mental hospital. In the end Fitz joins the Doctor and Sam in their adventures though time and space!!!It has a mix of mind trips,chases etc. It is a classic story !!A must for fans of this series or sci-fi in general!!!