Many contemporary American poets earn their livings by university teaching, most often by teaching creative writing; Emily Grosholz, however, has distinguished herself by teaching philosophy and by crafting four books of poetry that explore her philosophical concerns. Yet, her poetry is not philosophical in any conventional sense, for it does not depend upon pithy sententiae or abstract meditations on Being. Grosholz aims for what she describes in an essay on Czeslaw Milosz as "the delicate enmeshment of universal and particular." In Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (1991), articles such as "Leibniz and Plato against the Materialists" (1996) and her frequent essays and reviews on poetry, Grosholz has consistently opposed reductionism and charted the tensions between subjectivity--"the unity of thought that confronts matter and tries to represent it"--and the pull of the external world. While not eschewing subjectivity, she stresses that poets and philosophers should be conscious...