Books by Michael Heller

A Freakonomics-style investigation into the mysteries of ownership, filled with counterintuitive insights and fascinating case studies.

An original selection of work by one of America''s greatest living poets.For more than fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. His poems, shaped by Jewish and Buddhist thought and simultaneously lyrical and philosophical, engage the political and the natural world in an ongoing consideration of the responsibility and imaginative freedom of the poet. Profoundly reflective and deeply sensual, Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.

We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. This book examines how far our modern cosmological theories - with their sometimes audacious models, such as inflation, cyclic histories, quantum creation, parallel universes - can take us towards answering these questions.

These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with major figures from the past and poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.

These essays cover the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s.

Transforms Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles' shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann.

This study is based on a wide range of business sources as well as newspapers, journals, novels and oral history, allowing Heller to put forward a new interpretation of working conditions for London clerks, highlighting the ways in which clerical work changed and modernized over this period.