"Theodore Enslin began his artistic career as a musician, and the titles of many of his books suggest his continuing fascination with the "musication" of language: Etudes, Opus O, Songs w/out Notes, Carmina, The Diabelli Variations. Like other poets of his generation, Enslin carries forward Charles Olson's sense of the large historical and ethical function of poetry and his dedication, at once ecopoetic and ethnopoetic, to place. Also identified with the Objectivist tradition, he writes about finding meaning within everyday human life as he observes the irreducible reality of the things of this world." "Collecting Theodore Enslin's major work from 1993 to 2003, Nine is a companion volume to Enslin's Then, and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993, published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1999. Since the late 1980s, Enslin has devoted his energies primarily to the composition of theme-and-variations sequences, exploring the musical permutations of a limited cluster of words, and Nine collects these sequences."--BOOK JACKET.