Scaffolding: New and Selected Poems - Softcover

'This is a beautiful and stubborn book of poems. The poems say only what they mean. They have about them a great deep patience for the whole truth, a waiting in quietness for tremor and explosion' - Grace Paley 'A passionate commitment to the imagination, a craft which is both subtle and honorable, a continuing inner growth - these qualities have long drawn me to Jane Cooper's work. It is reason for celebration that we can trace through Scaffolding the development of a serious and deeply valuable artist' - Adrienne Rich

Jane Cooper was born in 1924 and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and Princeton, New Jersey. Her first collection of poems, "The Weather of Six Mornings", received the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1968. "Maps & Windows" followed in 1974 and, in 1979, the chapbook "Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison". In 1978 she was co-recipient of the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America. 'What poetry must do', she has written, 'is alert us to a truth, and it must be necessary; once it exists, we realize how much we needed exactly this'. "Scaffolding" presents Jane Cooper's new and selected poems gathered over three and a half decades, together with a remarkable autobiographical essay which goes to the heart of the conflicts associated with being a woman and a poet of her generation. Through its generous, imaginative and scrupulous attention to social and artistic truths, Jane Cooper's writing has never been more necessary.