The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 offers for the first time a comprehensive view of Michael Palmer’s extraordinary poetry. Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly innovative, Palmer’s work possesses a singular beauty. As Robert Creeley has stated, “The confident brilliance of this writing makes possible a place where words initially engage their meanings—as if the edge of all ‘creations,’ of all ‘worlds’ …” The poet himself has culled the 118 poems of The Lion Bridge from his great body of work. Rescuing from limbo much material that has gone out of print, this generous chronological selection (taken from seven of his books: Blake’s Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and At Passages) includes individual poems, selections from serial poems, a sequence for his daughter, and two complete serial poems. Together the poems form a bridge, from the concentrated intensity of the earliest works to the increasingly expansive and echoic later explorations of “the persons of the poem,” as well as our century’s “stammers and vanishings,” its “embers and folds.”