During a week in January 1981, poets Allen Grossman and Mark Halliday met for a series of conversations exploring "the meanings for us as poets arising from the difference between us-- differences of generation and education as well as of temperament and poetic style." The result was "Against Our Vanishing", which Charles Altieri called " the best in contemporary poetic thinking." "The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers" makes available a revised and significantly expanded version of "Against Our Vanishing" and includes Grossman's recent treatise "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in the Speculative Poetics". This combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-- across generations-- of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure". For students and teachers, for writers and readers, "The Sighted Singer" is a splendid introduction to both the tradition of poetry and its contemporary practice.

In the ideal writing program where criticism and creative writing imply, sustain, and nourish one another, Allen Grossman's ' Summa Lyrica' would be required reading. Alan Shapiro

Allen Grossman is professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a MacArthur Foundation grant recipient and the author of many books of poetry, including The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground and The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River. Mark Halliday is the author of Stevens and the Interpersonal and Tasker Street, which received the Juniper Prize for 1991. He teaches English at Wilmington Friends School in Delaware.