Selected poems

Poet, novelist, literary critic, and teacher, Randall Jarrell was a writer with many facets, but most of all, he was a poet with a unique voice, one that was by turns imaginative, realistic, sensitive, and ironic. From the narratives of army life during the Second World War to the domestic scenes he wrote about so movingly in his final book, The Lost World, Jarrell's poems are marked throughout by a voice that could be astonishingly intimate or could open up to speak to our common humanity. This collection, prepared by William H. Pritchard, presents some of Jarrell's finest poems to a new generation of readers.