In Half\/Mask<\/i>, Roger Mitchell goes in search of the magic that remains when the world is stripped down to \u201can inhospitable beauty.\u201d Many of these starkly lyrical poems explore the human and natural communities found on tundra and borrow freely from the great narrative and sculptural traditions of the Inuit and other rugged people who have learned to live intensely under challenging conditions. Whether in the High Arctic or in different places \u201cwhere human life . . . has a loose fit,\u201d Mitchell discovers a land rich in imagery and metaphor for describing experience at a fundamental level, out at the edge of what we can know: \u201cAlone and far away, remote, a step \/ or two beyond human, real being.\u201d An effort to understand and sympathetically inhabit the earth drives these poems, even in the barren isolation of their settings, and gives to Half\/Mask<\/i> its emotional resonance.<\/p>\nAbout the author<\/h3>\n
Roger Mitchell is the author of ten books of poetry, including\u00a0Delicate Bait<\/i>, the winner of the 2002 Akron Poetry Prize, and\u00a0Half\/Mask<\/i>. He has won the Midland Prize in poetry and the Akron Poetry Prize, plus fellowships from the NEA, Lilly Foundation, Indiana Arts Commission, and New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in way upstate New York with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.<\/p>\nOther books by Roger Mitchell<\/h3>\n