O Paradise

As Howard Nemerov has said in praise of William Trowbridge's first poetry collection: "he is very much up on the peculiarities of our little world ? He is both funny and serious, seriously funny; probably the best, if not the only, way of dealing with the complex predicament." Continuing in this third collection of poems to work in the realm of the serio-comic, Trowbridge explores other borderlands-between the tangible world and the intuitive one, between actuality and memory, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between self as flesh and blood and self as ghost. This is fast-faced, nervy poetry whose witty, vernacular language moves surprisingly toward transcendence.