Book excerpt: An original selection of work by one of America's greatest living poets. For more than fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. His poems, shaped by Jewish and Buddhist thought and simultaneously lyrical and philosophical, engage the political and the natural world in an ongoing consideration of the responsibility and imaginative freedom of the poet. Profoundly reflective and deeply sensual, Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.