Giving Their Word

the long version

"Based on a three-year series of interviews conducted by Steven Ratiner for the Christian Science Monitor, this book offers extended conversations with twelve of today's most influential poets. Published here in their entirety for the first time, their comments are wonderfully detailed, refreshingly honest, and provide the sort of intimate introduction to both poet and text that readers are rarely privileged to enjoy. In the book's closing piece, Steven Ratiner makes a return visit to Donald Hall's New Hampshire farm to conduct a moving interview shortly before the publication of Hall's collection Without, which focused on the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon."--BOOK JACKET.