Dark Wild Realm（ISBN=9780618919918）

Award-winning poet Michael Collier’s elegiac fifth collection is haunted by spectral figures and a strange, vivid chorus of birds: from a consideration of the weight of sparrows to a cardinal that crashes into his window to a gathering of turkey vultures, Collier engages birds as myth makers and lively messengers carrying memories from lost friends. Collier juxtaposes moments of quotidian revelation, such as waking to the laughing sounds of birdsong, with the drama of Greek tragedy, taking on voices from Medea. The mystery of death and the vital absence it creates are the real subjects of the book. Birds are the resurrectionists, writes Collier in the opening poem, “Birds Appearing in a Dream.”

Michael Collier has been the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference for five years and has taught English at the University of Maryland, College Park, for fifteen years. His previous volumes of poetry are THE CLASP AND OTHER POEMS, THE FOLDED HEART, THE NEIGHBOR, and most recently THE LEDGE, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Collier is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, NEA fellowships, and the Discovery/The Nation Award, among other honors. He resides in Catonsville, Maryland.

"tread nimbly between moments of everyday transcendence and spiritual pining." (Vanity Fair )"Exemplif[ies] how poetry, like memory itself, can reside in the infinite,overwhelming realm between the powerful dead and the living who hear their voice or feel their touch." (Washington Post Book World Poet's Choice (Robert Pinsky May 2006) )"Collier's fifth collection is a compact delight, filled with brief and poignant insights into the human condition...Readers will find Collier's poems refreshingly accessible, though never simplistic. They employ meditative feats of mind while remaining grounded on Earth." (Booklist )"Collier writes elegant, accessible, closely observed poems. It's a pleasure to encounter the words he so precisely selects...His writing seeks the unstable spaces between light and shadow, waking and sleep, spirit and body, and the places where the living and dead pass one another." (Washington Post Book World )