Begin Again : Collected Poems

Grace Paley was born in New York City and attended Hunter College and New York University. she taught at Columbia and Syracuse University during the 1960s before becoming a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. Although she is one of Americas best short story writers ( The Collected Stories 0-374-52431-9 ) , she began her writing career as a poet. Her stories and poems explore the lives of realistic characters, and her writing is deeply influenced by her lifelong work as a feminist and peace activist. She lives in New York City and Thetford, Vermont. As she told A.M. Homes in a Salon.com interview, when asked if writers have a moral obligation: Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it's as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there's a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Most writers do that naturally, see that more lives are illuminated, try to understand what is not understood and see what hasn't been seen.

A longtime teacher, activist, feminist, and masterful writer of short fiction and essays, Paley is also an accomplished poet. Combining her two previous collections with unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of a direct, attentive, and always unpredictable poet. Whether describing the vicissitudes of life in New York City or the hard beauty of rural Vermont, whether celebrating the blessings of friendship or protesting against social injustice, her poems brim with compassion and tough good humor.

Grace Paley is a writer and a teacher, a feminist and an activist. Her most recent book, Just as I Thought, is a collection of her personal and political essays and articles. In 1994, her Collected Stories was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York City and Vermont.

"She is funny and poignant, a writer of great power and great delicacy. She is one of our finest--and most original--poets."--Gerald Stern

"What I love most in Grace Paley's poetry is her unquenchable sense that the artist's life is not somewhere at the margins of community, that a dialogue is necessary between the poet and her people. The North American enterprise has injured this dialogue. Paley's exuberant, heartbreaking, committed poems call it back to health."--Adrienne Rich

"The art that Paley has displayed in her celebrated short stories is generally replaced in her poems by spontaneous, personal speech. These poems provide a tour through Paley's life, telling of her friends, her childhood memories and her struggle to come to terms with age and mortality."--Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review

"Paley is a master of the short form. . . . Her no-frills poetry, like that of the classic Chinese, speaks worlds with a minimum of words. . . . Paley's attentiveness, wry sense of self, and gift for finding drama in the plainest of moments imbue her poetry with toughness and joy."--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"In Paley, life, literature and politics converge--nonviolently, of course--in a cunning patchwork quilt of radiance and scruple, witness and example, nurture and nag, subversive humor and astonishing art: a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism."--John Leonard, The Nation

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 03-14-2001
Pages: 192
Measurements: 7.810in X 5.860in X 0.560in X 0.525lb