His poetry covers a wide range of themes and forms, from intensely personal volumes of private celebrations and losses--the the of a son, the break-up of a marriage, and his rural Wisconsin origins--to excursions into the psyches of a vast gallery of historical eccentrics, numbering among them a Bavarian King, a female saint, and founder of the Shaker religion, a Cornish vicar, an Hungarian countess, and mass murderer, a British romantic painter. **POEMS: SELECTED & NEW** includes a rich sampling of work written over the past thirty years, while collecting in a single volume many of Peters' most important poems. Readers will be struck by the power, emotional depth, and range of this retrospective collection; a book which should help further Peters' reputation as one of the most seminal American poets of recent decades. "The importance of Robert Peters' poetry rests on the fact that it modifies poetic language and breaks new artistic ground. By combining playful rhymes with painfully serious matter, he has returned new tonal possibilities to poetry. By fully exploiting the metaphor of the body, its epidermal shape and vulnerable interior, he has provided a fresh code for the expression of feeling."-- Billy Collins, in *A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry--* "The fascination with the dead, with the rotting, with pigs rooting into the earth; a poem about a primal scene in a root cellar, discovering sex as the underground, taboo, death-related experience--this is what all of Peters' poetry is about...It is this aspect of Peter's work.....which gives it great originality and power..." --Diane Wakowski, AMERICAN POETRY