A former United States Poet Laureate, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of numerous grants and awards, Mona Van Duyn has been hailed as one of our greatest living American poets. To help broaden and uniquely inform our understanding of Van Duyn’s work, editor Michael Burns has gathered ten essays, a poem, a succinct biographical sketch, and Van Duyn’s own laureate address to the Library of Congress.

In the first section of this collection, poets Maxine Kumin and Carolyn Kizer provide tributes that elucidate the special effect Van Duyn’s poetry has had on their work and thought. Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Howard contributes a poem that both extols the qualities of Van Duyn’s poems and lyrically places those qualities within her contemporary scene.

The second section contains eight essays exploring aspects as varied as Van Duyn’s penchant for particularity, her remarkable ability to rediscover for us the strangeness of everyday living, and her elegant style, fluid in both free verse and form. Included are contributions from Stephen Yenser, Rachel Hadas, Emily Grosholz, Sidney Burris, Ann Townsend, Michael Bugeja, Wyatt Prunty, and Jane Hoogestraat.

The final section opens with Van Duyn’s witty and incisive overview of the state of poetry in America at the close of the twentieth century. Also included is a short narrative history of Van Duyn’s literary career. Filled with keen prose by distinguished poets and critics, this collection is not only a resounding tribute to one poet’s body of work, but also a timely pulse-taking of the literary scene surrounding Van Duyn’s poetry.

Memory has recently become the focus of media attention because of the emotionally charged uses made of delayed recall of repressed memories. Integrating literatures from all corners of psychology, The Recovery of Unconscious Memories includes historical accounts, analysis of experiments, and treatment topics, providing the first comprehensive scientific account of memory and how can it can increase over time. Erdelyi includes his own important contributions to this field, ranging from his early attempts to use free-association to produce hypermnesia to his most recent research with hypnosis, subliminal stimuli, forced-recall techniques, and very long-delayed recall probes.

Sketching out the scientific foundations for a unified theory of repression that integrates the findings of the laboratory and the clinic, this comprehensive and authoritative synthesis of a century of memory research will be crucial reading for psychologists and clinicians, as well as forensic and legal professionals interested in the recovery of "inaccessible" memories.

"By debunking hypnosis, [Erdelyi] has allowed the debate on memory to move forward. . . . Erdelyi's work on hypermnesia is very important to our understanding of the mechanisms of memory and the brain."—Janet D. Feigenbaum, Times Literary Supplement