Ellen Bryant Voigt

Shadow of Heaven

"She writes with a classic authority...maturely, philosophically, and with passion and intelligence."—Booklist

Following her stringent and much-acclaimed Kyrie, Ellen Bryant Voigt's Shadow of Heaven returns us to rich texture and formal variety. Nature, fierce or generous, infuses this collection, made indelible through the poet's own fierce, generous determination to "bring outdoors inside, / the natural and wild, picked by my own hand . . ." In these moving, impeccably crafted poems and sequences, Voigt characteristically interrogates the forces of will and fate, the complexities of mind and heart. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted in its 2000 Award Citation, "With stoic commitment to meaning, and with immense technical resources, Ellen Bryant Voigt has fashioned an art of passionate gravity and opulent music, an art at once ravishing and stern and deeply human."