The source of the elegant metaphysics that shape Auster's distinctive fiction, from his seminal New York Trilogy to his most recent riddling tale, Oracle Night [BKL O 1 03], is found in his earliest works, spare and philosophical poems. Auster published six collections between 1974 and 1980, and selections from each, as well as some of his translations of the French poets who have so deeply influenced him, including Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and Jacques Dupin, are gathered here to form a remarkably meditative volume. Auster's exquisitely balanced poems are theorems postulating the nature of being, equations that seek to define the relationship between consciousness and matter, language and experience. He begins with some basics--stone, seed, roots, the beam of a watchful eye, the blank page of a desert landscape--and slowly fills this subtly biblical mindscape with musings on the puzzles of existence, our elemental struggles with adversity both natural and designed by humankind, and the mysteries of the self and of love. Auster's collected poems are crucial to his ravishing oeuvre.