from the Foreword: "The author is a distinguished scientist in the Yale medical school, but her knowledge ranges far beyond the limits of science and embraces all of humanist culture. I also know of few contemporary poets who can so convey the wonder of human existence so close to its terror, and in a voice intimate yet elusive in its authority-that edges towards the visionary. The highest intensity, among many intensities, is to be found in her volume Fragmented, a sequence of poems for her late husband. They are among the finest poems of mourning I have ever read. A virtuosity of form and technique matches the intensity of the emotion in a stunning lyrical sequence." -CLIVE BUSH: Professor & poet, King's College, London from the Introductory Essay: "Laura Manuelidis is not someone who writes verses -she is a poet by all the pulsation of her soul. There are some poets who have a subtlety, but don't have a passion; others have a passion but unfortunately at the expense of subtlety have lost all passion. She has a rare quality: her passion is subtle. I admire her lines: "If I were one stripe of a shirt / On the back of a man / Would I wrinkle Or would I smile / Between the angles of his scapulae?" -YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO : Russian Poet another Commentary: "We have in this collection a poetry that is direct and brave, from a knowing and a felt intelligence that can come only from a life lived fully. And that life-as scientist and doctor, mother, lover and friend-is put before us with passionate honesty, to herself and to her reader. Poems and science, she writes, must "make nature visible." And she indeed does as she tells us of love and loss, of places remembered, and of life's wonder and life's pain. Life comprises, to use a line from one of her poems, "convolutions impossible to hold." These poems do hold those convolutions, and reading them is to keep company with a voice that holds us as well. This is a collection to be read and read again." -JOHN P. LOGE, Jr.: Dean, Timothy Dwight College, Yale