“This book gathers under one roof poems from all of Richardson’s earlier collections, a number of which are out of print: Reservations (1977), Second Guesses (1984), As If(1992), A Suite for Lucretians (1999), How Things Are (2000), and Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays (2001), as well as a large selection of new poems and aphorisms.
A distillation of three decades of work, Interglacial will introduce this poet to a new generation of readers. Richardson fans will be pleased to discover early poems long out of print, and to see this poet’s work in a larger, retrospective context.”
“.There’s a broad, probing, unusual intelligence in [Richardson’s] work, an unusual kind of technical introspection and a wide-ranging inspiration and content that use as their matter images and ideas from sources as far afield as ancient philosophy, and contemporary science…it is work that brings news to us of packets of mental and emotional experience that haven’t sung so well together in poetry for a longer time than one would care to think”–C.K. Williams
“LaRochefoucauld, Joubert, Lichtenberg, O.V. Milosz, Nietzsche, and now Richardson: given the ease with which its very grammar persuades the reader that what was never said before has always been true, available, and satisfying, it’s odd how few writers’ minds the aphorism has colonized. But consider the general reputation of the aphorism’s practitioners: other than the greatest hits trotted out by speechwriters from the White House on up to high school salutatorians, authors of witty quotes are remembered for the pith of their diction, a few key words (amour-propre, anyone?), and a strange kinship with comedians and morticians. James Richardson is a poet, one of the few whose “new and selected” gets stronger as it gets newer.”
James Richardson was born in 1950, and is the author of six books of poetry and three critical studies. The recipient of the Cecil Hemley and Robert H. Winner Prizes from the Poetry Society of America and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.
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