Twenty Questions: (Posed by Poems)

New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. First ed., first printing (full number line). Octavo with black half-cloth boards in black and whtie pictorial jacket; xii, 200 pages; 23 cm Near fine, a clean tight and bright copy in very good (-) jacket with sunning to spine and rear of jacket, now in archival mylar. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780231111720, 023111172X

"In Twenty Questions, one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical - and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars Poetica unavailable elsewhere - J.D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind."--BOOK JACKET. Contents: A word first. Reading. Dreaming. My fountain pen. Commonplaces. Twenty questions. Reading Pope. Aspects of "Battle-Piece". Woman in white. Wildness asking for ceremony. At her other desk. Laughter in the soul. Songs of a curmudgeon. The exile's song. Chiselled breath. Sitting here strangely on top of the sunlight. The lost Upland. Encountering the sublime. Braving the elements. Masters. The art of poetry.