Eye Level (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series: Poetry) - Softcover

JANE SHORE grew up in North Bergen, New Jersey. Her first collection of poems, Eye Level, won the 1977 Juniper Prize; her second book, The Minute Hand, won the 1986 Lamont Poetry Prize, awarded by The Academy of American Poets; her third, Music Minus One, was a 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and her most recent collection, Happy Family, was published by Picador in 1999. She received a fellowship from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a Fellow in Poetry at the Radcliffe Institute, an Alfred Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Goodyear Fellow at the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, and a Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at The George Washington University. She has twice received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts. A Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English at Harvard University, Jane Shore was also Visiting Distinguished Poet at the University of Hawaii. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Poetry (for which she received The Bess Hokin Award), The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Tikkun, and The New Yorker. She is a professor at The George Washington University and lives in Washington, D.C., and in Vermont with her husband, the novelist Howard Norman, and their daughter, Emma.

"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."―Library Journal

"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."―Booklist