All Night, the Lilies

By Caroline Bassett

This collection lives between "Idyll and Anti-Idyll" - the title of one of the collection's most moving poems - but whatever the topic of individual poems, this collection constantly returns to beauty as its anchor: the scent of "freshly opened trees," "the sun-road on the water," the blue of delphiniums that is "like walking ... into the sky."

-Jude Nutter, author, Dead Reckoning and three other collections

Bassett gives us poems that hurt and poems that grant peace, because how she writes about pain and peace in the world, in its humans, and in her own spirited self, rings authentic. I'm grateful that this tough-minded, beautiful book is in our world.

-Deborah Keenan, author, eleven poetry collections and from tiger to prayer

Caroline Bassett's All Night, the Lilies ranges through near-dizzying juxtapositions of time and place. Poems of family, travel, art, love, nature, and self-questioning spin together to form a kind of poetic hologram of a life deeply lived.

-Thomas R. Smith, author, Medicine Year and Storm Island

With a heart as big as the Maxwell House billboard outside her childhood window, Carrie Bassett has figured out, in life and in poems, how to live in this messy world. Through the windows of a lifetime in many rooms, betrayals and heartbreaks and loves, Bassett has discovered inside the art of others - poems, paintings, the natural world - and in herself, the fragrance of every dawn.

-James P. Lenfestey, author, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GZB5KXM6
• ISBN13: 9798901468234
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Kelsay Books
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"