UI Press | Michael Van Walleghen | In the Black Window: New and Selected Poems

In the Black Window

New and Selected Poems

Quirky, odd, and disturbing poems that exemplify some of the most elegant, formal free verse to be found in contemporary American poetry

The title of Michael Van Walleghen's new collection evokes thematic preoccupations that have shadowed him throughout his long career. Appearing as a phrase in the poems themselves, In the Black Window more generally points to Van Walleghen's enduring interest in the intersection between inner and outer worlds of experience--those liminal moments in other worlds where we become aware of ourselves. We live at once in a strictly personal, material dimension but also in a distinctly spiritual one. Yet, when looking from a lighted kitchen into a night-black window on a winter evening, we might perhaps become suddenly aware not only of our own reflection, but also of our complicity in some deeper mystery altogether.

Michael Van Walleghen is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He won the Lamont Award for More Trouble with the Obvious, a Pushcart Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. His previous books include The Wichita Poems, Blue Tango, Tall Birds Stalking, and The Last Neanderthal. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and other highly respected journals.