Michael Collier ’76 publishes new book of poetry

The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems by Michael Collier ’76 will be published in August by The University of Chicago Press.

“The Missing Mountain brings together a lifetime of work, chronicling Collier’s long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. These selections, both of previously published and new poems, chart the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of his passions and concerns,” writes The University of Chicago Press.

“These poems cross expanses, connecting the fear of missing love and the bliss of holding it, the ways we speak to ourselves and language we use with others, and deep personal grief and shadows of world history.”

Collier will also have two poems appearing in the Spring 2021 issue of Ploughshares. The literary magazine will publish “Ian Brought a Claw-Foot Tub from Williston to Cornwall” and “In Life,” the latter of which appears in The Missing Mountain.

Collier will be in residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, for the month of November, and is “looking forward to being in the Connecticut College neighborhood again.” 

Collier is the author of eight collections of poems. He is professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and emeritus director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. He was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001 to 2004. He has received numerous honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

CC Magazine ran a collection of Collier’s poems in the Winter 2019 issue.