<i>Long for This World</i> features the best of Ronald Wallace's work from his previous collections of poetry—<i>Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks </i>(1981), <i>Tunes for Bears to Dance To</i> (1983), <i>People and Dog in the Sun</i> (1987), <i>The Makings of Happiness</i> (1991), <i>Time's Fancy</i> (1994),and <i>The Uses of Adversity</i> (1998)—along with a generous selection of twenty-six new poems. If Wallace's recent poems sometimes seem darker and deeper, more meditative and complex, less sanguine about the tragedies of daily life, they never sacrifice the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become his hallmarks.