Giving Their Word

Distinguished poets reflect on their lives and work; Based on a three-year series of interviews conducted by Steven Ratiner for the Christian Science Monitor, this book offers extended conversations with twelve of today's most influential poets. Published here in their entirety for the first time, their comments are wonderfully detailed, refreshingly honest, and provide the sort of intimate introduction to both poet and text that readers are rarely privileged to enjoy. Included are conversations with William Stafford, Mary Oliver, John Montague, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Forche, Martin Espada, Marge Piercy, Rita Dove, and Bei Dao. In the book's closing piece, Steven Ratiner returns to Donald Hall's New Hampshire farm to conduct a moving interview shortly before the publication of Hall's collection Without, which focused on the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon.