Crossing to Sunlight Revisited

Crossing to Sunlight Revisited offers both a retrospective and a current look at the work of Paul Zimmer. It contains twenty-three poems not included in Zimmer's previous career-spanning work, Crossing to Sunlight, or, as Zimmer writes, "a total of seventy-three poems, one for each of the years I have lived." When Crossing to Sunlight appeared in 1997, the Gettysburg Review described Zimmer as a poet who "invests language with the vitality of desire" and who "unlike many poets in his generation, has forgone stylistic complacency and continued to explore the possibilities inherent in language." Being a poet, says Zimmer, is "perhaps the only courageous thing I have done in my life." Here is a generous measure of that courage, of that body of work that once moved Robert Olen Butler to write, "I turn again and again to Zimmer's poetry to remind myself what the essence of all literary art is: the moment."