Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Sholeh Wolpé's third collection of poems, is a surreal journey of sorrows and sins, of love, ghosts, and Saudi princes, of banishment inside one's own skin. Wild in its leaps and images, these poems explore personal and psychological exile from a marriage, lovers, expectations, and finally, country.

This stunning collection heralds the debut of a most gifted poet, one who turns to the formal traditions of the past to celebrate and elegize our vast and transient world in which human stories—tragedies and triumphs—are invariably bound up with nature. K. E. Duffin’s poems are about transformations, from life to death and from death to life, from the sprawl of experience to the spare music of the poem that can reach the future only through memory. These are poems that court the ear and eye alike. They surprise us with their elegant forms and rich, classical themes; they delight us with their force of language and delicious renderings of the vast complications of things.