Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

Thomas Hardy spent half a century writing poetry his readers never knew existed. Published in the year of his death, this collection gathers the novelist-poet's most intimate visions: flashes of memory, lost faces, the unbearable sweetness of moments that will not return. Hardy writes not of grand passions but of the small, annihilating truths: a voice heard once and never again, the way light falls on a landscape that has outlived everyone who ever loved it. His verse is spare and unflinching, stripped of Victorian ornament, finding in plainness a power that cuts to the bone. Here is memory as wound, love as haunting, time as the only true narrator. For readers who know Hardy only through Tess and Jude the Obscure, these poems reveal the source of his darkness and his strange, stubborn beauty.