Dara Wier's poetry is extremely rewarding and a joy to read. Funny, smart and beautiful, this stuff is hard to resist. I love how intricate the world seems after reading her work: nothing is simple as she peels layer after layer off the commonplace, reducing it to a crystal of emotion and sense.

Dara Wier is a genuinely distinctive and exciting American poet. In book after book, she has always written work that is fresh and often hair-raising in its innovative and playful vigor. This new collection extends that work into new and profound ground. It really is a master plan by a master poet.

Dara Wier is well-known throughout a broad international community of readers and critics, and with Voyages in English she has taken a step into perception that will carry even deeper into their hearts. Society and individuals are always in a state of change, and within that there are always those people who make inevitable change into a conscious process. Her poems are not only charming to the sensibilities, and outstanding from an intellectual point of view, but her words seem to gather like a flock of birds falling to us from the air, sweeping away what needs to be swept away, then rising again and dispersing on the wing. If not birds her poems are tools, if not tools they are simply what is needed to freshen and enliven and purify that part of the mind which they address. But if they are really "not" something, they are not merely personal, oblique impressions that slide on by. In such finely crafted poetry it is implied that the reader must give a little effort, and, in this case, the effort given is a pleasure - better than a game, better than random engagement with what immediately pleases us. As an exercise, if you have not already, try this. My friend Mary and I read the poems aloud together one at a time. And like a poem itself, started in with our thoughts and impressions until we "found" what we could understand as the essence, while the rhythms and phrasing were repeated and expanded for us as we read back to them and told what we thought we were hearing. We did this until we had to make ourselves stop because of the late night; it was fun, and it was illuminating. A poem is a friend when we are alone and silent and traveling through it. It is something different altogether when you focus on it with a friend. Is it better than TV and chocolate cake? I would say, most of the time, yes! Dara Wier's poems here will make you forget them both. Some titles to consider in this volume: If I Were a Raptor Cruising through the Timetables of History, One Enchanted Evening, They're Gone, A Kind of Roux, The Next step. I could name them all. She is a master poet, and I recommend these poems highly to men and women alike - and for one of each to get together with them - as they incline, not toward gender, but toward clarity of mind. In these personal condensations of thought, pure spirit is always near. *** Seeing