In Ted Pearson' s riveting and generous book, Early Autumn, he reminds us of our ongoing tradition as poets: We' re happy to welcome a new generation, but song remains the first best answer to the question you' ve been meaning to ask. I' ve been reading Pearson' s poetry over many years and have always admired the etched quality of mind and music that marks this capacious but acute work. Pearson is a supreme formalist, he always finds a way to get it done, book after book, and in Early Autumn, the sentence is the measure of a polis. While the overall effect might teeter on the kaleidoscopic, the thinking is more orchestral in nature. Simply put, throughout his writing life, Ted Pearson has been writing what I would like to call " a lyric of reality," and by building a lyric of reality he assures the reality of the lyric as a resonant tool to understand the human project.