Eye Level (Juniper Prize for Poetry) - Hardcover

Jane Shore received the Bess Hokin prize, given by Poetry Magazine, in 1973, and the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1973 and 1975. She was a Fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute, a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard University, and a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. Jane Shore was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for 1978 and a Massachusetts Endowment for the Arts and Humanities grant in 1976.

Centered in ways of seeing, this book offers a humane and intelligent exploration of worlds we encounter in objects, in other people, in ourselves. Shore begins within the innocent eye's exploration, often enchanted, often terrified, into lit interiors of advent calendar, glass paper-weight; moves through the minds of biblical women; and finally into woman's solitary self-recognition. 'I can only carry/ myself into my life.' Lovers divided from one another, briefly joined; the fragility and wonders of this world; the necessity of separation and survival; the power of the eye to see, the mind to discern and know-- these are themes Shore develops in language so deft, images so etched in light that one is constantly amazed and renewed.

Shore's extremely detailed, precise poems are about the author's place in the world, her actions, reactions, dispositions, and feelings. They are not confessionals but poems of discovery that often take several angles to any subject and scrutinize each in turn.