Talking to the Dead

<p>Literary Nonfiction. "This beautiful prose collection strikes very deep notes. Rachel Hadas known for her formal dexterity and intelligence demonstrates here a remarkable fluency in moving from the disarmingly personal to the perceptively literary-critical from the daily round to the ancient world and from heartbreak to wonderment. Poetry is alive in her as is a calm humane attentiveness to the normalcy of grief and the possibilities of consolation." Phillip Lopate<br /><br />"As I read TALKING TO THE DEAD I felt I was engaged in a wide- ranging personal pleasurable and erudite conversation with Rachel Hadas herself. She is deft as few others are at integrating her deep scholarship with a compassionate understanding of the human and the humorous everyday and as she turns her sharp eye clear intelligence and ready wit on subjects as various as Dante and dreams Homer and Plath snakes and centaurs illness and invisibility she never fails to surprise stimulate and satisfy both heart and mind." Lydia Davis"</p>