Selected Poems

Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems gathers more than 170 of her lyrics on love, loss, faith, death, immortality, nature, and the mind’s private weather: brief, dash-broken poems in which a bee, a fly, a slant of light, or a funeral in the brain can open onto eternity. The voice is intimate yet impersonal, mixing hymn-meter with slant rhyme and sudden metaphors—“Hope is the thing with feathers,” death as a courteous carriage ride, the soul choosing its own society. Compression and surprise do the work of argument; a single stanza can move from a garden path to the grave, from doubt to a hard-won sense of presence. The selection shows her range rather than telling a life story: ecstasy and numbness, comic exactness and grief, the ordinary world made strange and the infinite made near.

Bound in cloth, printed with a design by the artist. 12 integrated wood engravings. Printed endpapers. Translucent dust-jacket (no slipcase).