A highly original selection of poems by this greatest of modern poets, both well-known favorites and new discoveries, all of them rendered in new versions that combine contemporary speech with Rilke's inimitable poetic voice, a voice that is by turns somber, majestic, and remarkably playful. This collection, drawing primarily on Rilke's extremely rich middle period and concluding with a selection from his late Sonnets to Orpheus, offers a clear, powerful, and contemporary Rilke. David Young's introduction charts the crucial growth of the poet's modernism in his Paris years, finding in his admiration for artists like Cezanne, Rodin, and Van Gogh a new conception both of the working artist and of art's true subject matter.