Skywriting

The winner in the third annual contest for the New Criterion Poetry Prize, Skywriting and Other Poems is a triumphant book by an acknowledged master of the craft. Charles Tomlinson's unfailing sensitivity and decorum toward the visual world is brilliantly realized in this new book. Willard Spiegelman calls him "a patient looker at landscape." Whether his subject is a temple in Japan, the landscapes of his native England, or the "lithe iambics" of two runners on a beach in Italy, Mr. Tomlinson's extraordinary perception is everywhere evident. It is a perception that lights up the world, "as lightning explores the sleeping face of nature." His ethical sense emerges not from politics or a social agenda but from his precise and fastidious evaluation of the perceived world. Donald Hall calls him "a master of the craft....His poems have the finality of form which you find only among the first-rate."