Interweaving more than two dozen new poems with original poems from four previous volumes, this collection presents the first full assessment of one of the most original and moving voices in contemporary poetry. Balaban’s poems reflect a courageous and eloquent search for a moral stance, requiring resolution not merely with the ambiguities of history, but with a deep sense of personal responsibility. The moral imperatives of his earliest poems (and translations from the Vietnamese) inform and clarify the poetry he has written in maturity - as husband, father, and citizen. As Melville and Whitman did in the nineteenth century for survivors of the Civil War, Balaban brings a distinctively elegiac, personal voice to speak for an age.