Eric Trethewey is the author of five collections of poems, Dreaming of Rivers, Evening Knowledge, The Long Road Home, Songs and Lamentations and Heart's Hornbook. Evening Knowledge was a winner in the 1990 Virginia Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of a volume of essays, Marginal Lessons: Essays on Life and Letters. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The New Republic, The Southern Review and Canadian Literature. The Home Waltz, a screenplay, won the Virginia Governor’s Screenplay Competition. He teaches in the creative writing program at Hollins University.

About Songs and Lamentations:

"'Why are we not better than we are?' This heartbroken question arises out of the intimacy these poems have with sorrow and loss. No easy answers here. The hard-won acceptance Trethewey's candid poems manifest lows for and affirms 'the little we may expect'--blessing in song, momentary clarities."
—Margaret Gibson

"Eric Trethewey's new collection of poems, Songs and Lamentations, is his strongest yet, unflinching in its gaze into the abyss, unwavering in the sureness of its song. It is seldom in contemporary poetry that one finds such honesty and such craft united in one voice. Trethewey faces his failures directly and, by lamenting them, allows his readers to share their own failings with him, to know truly what it is to be of the earth, earthy. But the poetry he makes of that painful recognition frees those readers as well: 'language / with life at its core: enchanted words, / the lovely archaisms of innocence and attention, / the breathtaking syllables of care.' I recommend this book highly to anyone who does not wish to look away from the abyss but seeks the vital transformation of lamentation into song."
—R.H.W. Dillard