Poetry. Peter Klappert's 1975 collection of poems CIRCULAR STAIRS, DISTRESS IN THE MIRRORS is available again for the first time in two decades. In this collection, the artist Michael Hafftka created a new drawing for each of the poems. In twenty tightly wound, intensely inward poems, CIRCULAR STAIRS explores relationships of self and Shadow, ego and inner antagonist, creator and created. Compared with much of Klappert's other work, the poems here are spare, elegiac, and by turns, lyric, narrative and dramatic. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake says, "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy,/ Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence." In this collection the psyche often finds itself imprisoned in tension-filled stasis, struggling to progress. Michael Hafftka responds to each poem with a drawing expressing his relationship with the work. The linguistic and psychological subtlety of the poems inspires the nervous and enigmatic intensity of the drawings, transforming the emotional into the figurative. "The darkness of Klappert's work is never simplistically pessimistic or cynical.... [He] recognizes that to be fully human aware of one's own potentialities for good and evil, capable of real relationships with others, and at home in one's environment is an intensely difficult task, one at which we are apt both as individuals and as a society to fail"--Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since 1945. Peter Klappert is the author of six collections of poems, including Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1971), The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) and Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems 1966-1999 (Orchises, 2000). He has taught at Rollins College, Harvard University, New College (Florida), The College of William and Mary and George Mason University. Michael Hafftka is a visual artist represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the MoMA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and other public and private collections. He has had one-man shows at numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad.