Bernadette Mayer is a poet whose experiments in form and in language have attracted favorable critical reaction and the attention of numerous fellow poets and writers, leading some observers to consider her one of the most important experimental writers of recent years. Her most important work features a startling inclusivity by which the poet tries to re-create the innumerable objects, events, memories, and dreams that range into the field of an alert consciousness. Mayer has lived many years in New York City, the setting for many of her poems. In 1972 she burst onto the New York performance art scene with her experimental piece Memory. In the following years she has continued to write and publish. Perhaps one of her most important works is the book-length poem Midwinter Day (1982), which describes a day in the poet's life in 1978 when she was living in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Mayer's work is closely...