Summons

Winner of the 1999 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Charles Simic.

"The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler's art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe that this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry." —from the Foreword by Charles Simic