David Biespiel's energetic language, so varied and musical and precise, is quite unmatched by that of other contemporary poets. The Book of Men and Women is his second collection in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and as always he is the master of the long line, his words strung across its reach as tightly as beads. But new poems in this book explore the intimacies of the shorter line as well and display Biespiel's formal inventiveness and emotional range.

The Book of Men and Women addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global. The first section of the book is filled with the wonderful agitation of spell-making language. The poems are connected to the social and historical world, and yet at the same time, they prepare us for the mythic story about men and women that is promised in the book's title. The second section is more formally restrained and as such imbues the speaker with the distinction and melancholy gravitas that characterize the collection. We see this in the remarkable and fully imagined tour de force, "William Clark's Sonnets."

The book concludes with a series of autobiographical poems that confront the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. These last poems, composed during an intense three-month period of writing, as well as the other poems in this remarkable volume, showcase Biespiel at the very top of his form.

David Biespiel is president and writer-in-residence at The Attic Writers' Workshop.

Evening Watch

1

Genesis 12

Poet at Forty

Though Your Sins Be Scarlet

The Ex-Lovers Close Down the Hawthorne Boulevard

Bars on the 1000th Night of the War

Embouchure

Kohain

The Sleeping Beauty

Dover Butch

Citizen Dave

Tale Bearer

2

Mississippi God Damn

Richard Hugo

Old Adam Outside the Wall of Eden

Genesis 27

Overcast

William Clark's Sonnets

Ezra Pound

Bad Marriages

Luke's Ukulele

P.O.E.M.

Mass Man

3

The Husband's Tale

The Wife's Tale

The Wife's Tale (II)

The Crooner

Prudery

Lust

A Cloud of Crows

Engine Man

Little Crow

Rag and Bone Man

4

Man and Wife

Bloom and Decay

The Hummingbird

Bathsheba

Psalm 51

The Green Bed

Banished

Marvel

Secret

Ovid in Exile

Dissolution in Winter

O'Bryant Square

The Theory of Hats

Acknowledgments

About the Poet

A Note on the Type