Robert Pack is a narrative master blessed with a keen ear for everyday speech. In poems that recall Robert Frost's meditative regard of nature, Pack's newest collection, Elk in Winter, resolves universal questions in the particular, the personal, and the intimate. This rich and varied volume moves from comedy to elegy, from lyric to narrative, in which individual characters are revealed and rendered symbolic by the stories that enclose them. What finally unites the poems of Elk in Winter is Pack's desire to appeal to the ear as much as to the heart, and to discover and reveal the passionate music of ideas.

Robert Pack is the Albernethy Professor of Literature and a Creative Writing Emeritus at Middlebury College, where he taught for thirty-four years and directed Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Currently he lives in Missoula and teaches at the Honors College of the University of Montana. He is author of eighteen books of poems, most recently, Fathering the Map, Minding the Sun, and Rounding It Out, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

conversion in progress— Peter Reading, Times Literary Supplement

— Harold Bloom

— Mark Strand