A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Nine Gates is a book about the writing and reading of poems; it is also about consciousness itself, about the way the mind and heart shift into a different kind of awareness when they are joined in a language working fully in every part.<p>A superb primer for the general reader, Nine Gates is also a manual for the working writer, each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow the art to convey complex meaning and emotion with clarity and force.<p>Above all, Nine Gates is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our most fundamental consciousness to its fullest life.