One of our most acclaimed and versatile authors, Fred Chappell is comfortably at home in fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. A Way of Happening gathers his essays and reviews of contemporary poetry. Chappell consider new writers as well as more established authors, including Alfred Corn, William Matthews, A. R. Ammons, Linda Pastan, Julia Randall, Cornelius Eady, Alan Shapiro, and many others. And there are essays on the plight of the critic

In his volume of critical essays The Government of the Tongue, Seamus Heaney scrutinizes the poetry of many masterful poets. Throughout the collection, Heaney's gifts as a wise and genial reader are exercised with characteristic exactness, and we are reminded, above all, of the essentially gratifying nature of poetry itself.