<div> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. <i>Poetry of the Law</i>, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law.<BR><br> <I>Poetry of the Law</i> is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, <I>serious</i> need not imply <I>solemn.</i> Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present.</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Set in courtrooms, lawyers' offices, law-school classrooms, and judges' chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think “Scottsboro”) or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. <i>Poetry of the Law</i> is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal"> <BR> Contributors Include:</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">W. H. Auden</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Robert Burns</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Lewis Carroll</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">John Ciardi</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Daniel Defoe</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Emily Dickinson</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">John Donne</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Rita Dove</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Ralph Waldo Emerson</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Martín Espada</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Thomas Hardy</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Seamus Heaney</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">A. E. Housman</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Langston Hughes</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Ben Jonson</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">X. J. Kennedy</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Yusef Komunyakaa</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Ted Kooser</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">D. H. Lawrence</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Edgar Lee Masters</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">W. S. Merwin</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Edna St. Vincent Millay</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Sir Walter Raleigh</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Muriel Rukeyser</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Carl Sandburg</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">William Shakespeare</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Jonathan Swift</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Mona Van Duyn</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Oscar Wilde</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">William Carlos Williams</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">from “The Hanging Judge” by Eavan Boland</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Come to the country where justice is seen to be done,</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Done daily. Come to the country where</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal">Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw</p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="M