The Lion Bridge, Selected Poems 1972-1995 offers for the first time a comprehensive view of Michael Palmer's extraordinary poetry. Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly avant-garde, Palmer's work has a matchless beauty, difficult to de scribe: as Common Knowledge remarked, "Even more than its music, it emanates silence". The poet himself has culled the 118 poems of The Lion Bridge from his great body of work. This generous chronological selection (taken from seven of his books: Blake's Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and At Passages), includes individual poems, selections from serial works, and one complete serial poem. Together the poems form a bridge, a kind of work-biography which takes a long look at an extraordinary achievement and gives a new view of a body of work as the poet himself wishes it to be seen. It also rescues from limbo much material that has gone out of print.