About the Author:
Judith P. Saunders is Professor of English at Marist College in New York State, where she teaches courses in American and English literature, with special emphasis on twentieth-century poetry. Her published commentary addresses a wide range of literary topics, focusing on the work of American Renaissance, modern, and contemporary figures: Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Virginia Wolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and Howard Moss.

Throughout Charles Tomlinson's fifty-year career, borders have served him as setting, topic, theme, metaphor, and formal principle. Examining their presence and function in more than two hundred individual poems, this study offers a coherent framework for understanding the body of work created by a major, late twentieth-century poet. The borders he explores are spatial, temporal, perceptual, and ideological; thus they comprehend a wide range of concerns, from the ecological to the sociopolitical, the philosophical, the ethical, and the aesthetic. Defining what lies on either side of a given boundary, Tomlinson's work invites a back-and-forth process of comparison and contrast; hence it fosters a dynamic and multifaceted awareness. A commitment to principles of juxtaposition and counterpoint influences the prosodical workings of the poetry as well, manifesting itself in verse structure, in figurative usage, in deployment of rhyme, in line, in syntax, and in diction.