The Cave

C.G. Hanzlicek received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and a M.F.A. from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1986. He is the author of seven books of poetry: Living in It, Stars (winner of the 1977 Devins Award for Poetry), Calling the Dead, A Dozen for Leah, When There Are No Secrets, Mahler: Poems and Etchings, and Against Dreaming. He has translated Native American songs, A Bird's Companion, and poems from the Czech, Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. Since 1966, he has been teaching at California State University, Fresno, where he is the director of the Creative Writing Program.

Charles Hanzlicek's The Cave: Selected and New Poems, is poetry with an intuitive feel for the world of seas and high meadows, for hawks, lizards, people, and places filled with what poet James Wright once called "the genius of place.' These luminous, ruminative poems speak to us as directly as fresh wind with the power to measure human endeavor, communal aspiration, and individual despair. These are welcome, memorable poems, courage-built and always crafty, funny and wry, and deeply loving. Who could want more?