On a Stair

Ann Lauterbach's fifth collection takes its title from Emerson's great essay, Experience: "Where do we find ourselves?" he asks. Lauterbach's stair sits precariously between a quest for spiritual vitality and a sense of the overwhelming materiality of our world. Identifying with the clown, the nomad and the thief figures whose ghostly marginality haunt this book, Lauterbach brings us, with a dazzling range of formal and imagistic resources, to a new understanding of how language inscribes the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning.On A StairA Valentine for Tomorrow
Nocturnal Reel
Bramble Portrait
Figure without Ground
Poem of the Landscape
On (Tower)
Night Barrier
Poise on Row
Sequence with Dream Objects in Real Time
Blake's Lagoon
Free Fall
On (Word)
On (Open)
A Clown, Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A Moonlit Cove
On (Thing)
On (Dream)
The Return of Weather
Staircase
A History Lesson
Daylight Savings Time
Delayed Elegy
And The Question Of
Poem with Last Line from Epictetus
Here/This/There/That
Auction
On
N/est
InvocationAnn Lauterbach is Ruth and David Schwab III Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College. Her work has received fellowship support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation. She has published six collections of poetry, including If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000.