Hardcover: 101 pages ISBN: 0-8229-3774-3
Paperback: 101 pages ISBN: 0-8229-5518-0
University of Pittsburgh Press

Out of print.

Paperback is in stock at Open Books, A Poem Emporium.

www.openpoetrybooks.com

The author has a few new first edition hardcovers, and will sign them for you.
To order, please contact peggyzoe@gmail.com

Editorial Reviews:

From Library Journal

Moving from the heat of the American Southwest to the chill of Arctic glaciers, this work presents an interior geography between extremes. The poems evolve as if the occupants of a landscape even of works of art have taken a look around before evoking the muse. A strong narrative carries many of these poems as when the laborer "swears violently/because too much,/how he loves/her, is too much" and mood is courageously evoked through repetition of a single word. But most striking are the poems that are mythic in their effort to name: the qualities of October snow, "Kiernan's jovial yank," Fernandez with eyes like ermine leaping at cardinals.

Blurbs:

"Peggy Shumaker's The Circle of Totems isn't merely reflections on travel, it lives for what the Aleutian people of Alaska call movement, meaning passage made on a horizontal and vertical plane at once. We have cherished this kind of poetry-I am thinking of what Miss Bishop called the magic ubiquitous. This new book is simply wonderful."