From Booklist
Kizer's passionate, witty poetry has graced American letters for four decades, and, like a championship rose, it has been lovely in every period, from the tight, budlike, formal early work down to the big, blowsy poems of recent times. This fine collection happily includes ample sections of biographical prose as well as of verse translations and previously unpublished poems. Not that Kizer's work demands a biographical trellis. For, while never strictly a confessional poet, Kizer has provided personal context within each poem. One of the most striking aspects of her work is how avant-garde it appears--in terms of theme and voice, not of style. Her earliest book included poems in which she assumed the personae of goddesses; they remain more energetically feminine and feminist than many published yesterday. She has been vividly aware of female poets' dual roles as "handmaidens / To our own goddess . . . narcissists by necessity." Most powerfully, she has written of woman's struggle to speak and be heard in the multipartite poem "Pro Femina," which was published in sections over many decades. Most recently, Kizer has produced dozens of tender, passionate poems of age and loss, and she has defined herself as "yoked in sympathy for all that's human." The stately power of her verse has never failed her. No library should be without this collection. Patricia Monaghan
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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Carolyn Kizer's poetry has coursed sexual politics, social awareness, and literary reverence (and irreverence) with grace and flair. Cool, Calm, and Collected, Kizer's long awaited collected poems, gathers new poems together with selections from previous volumes, several of which have been unavailable for many years.

About the Author

Carolyn Kizer, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and was a fellow of the Chinese Government in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. In 1959, she cofounded Poetry Northwest and was its editor until 1965. She served as the first director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (from 1966 to 1970), was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has been a poet-in-residence at Columbia, Stanford, and Princeton. In 1988 she received the Theodore Roethke Award. Kizer lives in Sonoma, California.

FROM THE CRITICS

Melanie Rehak - New York Times Book Review