Within the world of contemporary poetry Michael Heller has staked out a territory all his own. His is the most important of many attempts to elaborate an "Objectivist" poetics, first described as such by Louis Zukofsky in a 1931 issue of Poetry magazine. Heller is faithful to the Objectivist desire for a poetry deriving from the senses, from fact and directness, yet he aspires to a more complex aesthetic. His poems are marked by an acute and highly original sensitivity to contemporary concerns about voice, language, history and knowledge. Henry Weinfield has noted in them the "penetration of the immediate, lived experience by something that [they refuse] to call 'eternity.' " They articulate a sublime uncertainty as well as absolute tangibility.

Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 11 May 1937, to Peter and Martha Rosenthal Heller. Heller's father, the son of a rabbi and writer, was brought as a...