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Annie Finch:  "Marie Moving" is a narrative allegorical poem about a woman's journey through a series of visionary and actual experiences. It is a coming-to-power story, undertaken as a contemporary epic. Its first publication will come in musical form, as the libretto for an opera called "Lily Among the Goddesses," which should be produced in New York during the next few seasons.

My new book of poetry, Calendars, will be published by Tupelo Press in the winter of 2002. This book is a collection of poems that takes a different direction than Eve, or maybe expands on the vision of Eve. Eve involves individual coming into consciousness, while most of the poems in Calendars explore relationships, with parents, children, lovers, and the earth. The poems trace how experience is structured in webs and cycles, circles of nature, life, and death, whether time is marked by the seasons, the moon, the sun, or the passages of life. There are love poems, a marriage poem, an elegy, birth poems, homages to other artists, a lullaby. Several of the poems are ritual poems, chants and songs written for different parts of the year.

Calendar's epigraph is from Louise Bogan: "No woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart." I feel the aesthetics of this book reflect the diversity of my influences-there are accentual pastiches that skew language in non-linear ways, which were published in experimental journals, and also poems in iambic pentameter that were published in places like the Yale Review or Hudson Review. But all of the poems use metrical music, rhythmic music to try to bring the body of our lost heart back into the world.