Tolle! Lege! 1
The Magic Kingdom 5
Dead Man 7
Florum Principi 10
The Drunkenness of Noah 14
Fitzcarraldo 16
The Third Day 18
The Heresies 20
UnChien Andalou 22
The Synthetic A Priori 25
The Eternal City 31
Book One 32
Book Two 33
Book Three 34
Book Four 35
Book Five 36
Book Six 37
Book Seven 38
Book Eight 39
Book Nine 40
Book Ten 41
Book Eleven 42
Book Twelve 43
Another Poem about Trains 47
What I Meant to Say 51
Some Great Desire 52
Three Poems for Walter Benjamin 54
Loggia 54
The Telephone 57
The Cabinet 59
No Lightsome Thing 62
Angels Unawares 64
Letter from Cornwall: To Stephen Dunn 68
Letter from Gozo: To Gerald Stern 71
The Festival at Nikko 74
Acknowledgments 75
Notes 77

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award
With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

Kathleen Graber teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of The River Twice (Princeton) and Correspondence and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker and the American Poetry Review, among other publications.