In her third chapbook, Mary Leonard gives us the lowdown on life. Though it turns out to be less than savory at times, she shows its sweets as well as its sours. There is loss and yearning here, but there is also a rising into new life through the energy of color, zest, and most of all, love.

In this memoir depicting her days as the wife of an undercover CIA agent on Cyprus just before and during the bloody civil war between Cypriot Greeks and Turks, Arlene Swift Jones has written a page-turner that describes the beauty and barbarity of landscape, customs, and ethnic duality on an island that has long been regarded as the Jewel of the Mediterranean but descends into a paradise lost when hostilities begin in 1963.

In his first book of poetry, Paul Scollan has distilled a lifetime of observation, some of it joyful, some of it rueful. We are treated to vivid characterization and description, an unflinching look at the worst life has to offer and an ebullient presentation of its shining moments. Scollan embodies Shakespeare’s definition of the poet as one who “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” In this case, the local habitation and name are those of Meriden, Connecticut.

Seth Steinzor has written a latter-day version of Dante's Inferno. In this, the first of his three-part transformation of the Divine Comedy, contemporary sinners are treated to contemporary variations on the torments of the original Nine Circles of Hell.

In her second book of poems, Peggy Sapphire again shows herself to be one of the most humane, honest, generous-hearted poets now writing, and one of the most spirited. In the End a Circle will give the rueful heart a change of mood.

In her first poetry collection, Mollie Pilling draws upon her many years of living, journeying, and teaching in foreign lands. In these intelligent, visceral, sometimes rambunctious, sometimes heart-breaking poems, the author’s journeys are emotional as well as geographical. She glories in the joys of motherhood and all varieties of love, but she also mourns the losses that follow unleashings of the heart.

In this remarkable collation of poems by fellow classmates of Yale’s Class of 1955, Donald H. Werner has assembled and edited work showing that 1955 was a very good year for sending poets out into the world, at least in New Haven.