The Various Light now on Amazon Kindle
=The Various Light=. It's strange to reread of book you published 35 years ago. After living in New York for a decade and a half, I moved to New Haven and began teaching poetry writing for the first time. Maybe it was the contrast between the intense urbanity of New York and the accessibility of woodland and sea that led me to explore the pastoral tradition, which begins with Theocritus, continues with Virgil, and was a central genre in English poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries. The green world, where Pan rules, and companionable rustics sing their lyrics. Empson's updating of the mode in =Some Versions of Pastoral= helped out, too. My title is a phrase from Marvell's =The Garden=.