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Samuel Menashe's poetry has a mysterious simplicity, a spiritual intensity and a lingering emotional force. For the past 50 years he has practiced his art of 'compression and crystallization' (in Derek Mahon's phrase) in poems that are brief in form but profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. As Stephen Spender wrote, Menashe 'compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds'. Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe's work stands apart in its solitary meditative power, but it is equally a poetry of the everyday. The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms, here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open. Expanded from its original Library of America compilation, this edition covers the full range of his work, from the early collections to very recent work, and includes a DVD of "Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe", a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. This features a visit to Menashe in the tiny apartment in New York's Greenwich Village where he has lived since the 1950s. Now in his 80s, Menashe still knows all his poems by heart, and between engaging digressions on poetry, life and death, recites numerous examples with engaging humor, warmth and zest.
