This volume is the first UK publication by Peter Cole, an acclaimed American-Israeli poet and translator. The book reprints the entire contents of his two US collections, Rift (1989) and Hymns & Qualms (1998) under one set of covers and enables a new readership to get to know a remarkable and most original voice. As US poet Forrest Gander observed: The keenness of his mind and the moral seriousness of his work astonish ...the exquisite specificity of his diction and the intricacy of his prosody are without parallel among the poets of his - and my - generation.