“I pause on the upswing of the thought” Lyn Hejinian writes in her 1966 poem “The Guermantes Way”, and what we experience over and over, within the air-born pause, is her notation of an abundant and openly curious joy. Hejinian’s vitalism was not only linguistic, as her long participation in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement in American poetry might suggest, but committedly conceptual. She brought a gloriously supple difference to the concept: in her work, thinking radiates delight and the poem is a unit of wonder poised in critical tension with its social and material environment. From the elegantly spare compositions of her 20s, which show an Objectivist-inflected ear for sound intricacy and internal rhyme held aloft by the play of pun and riddle, we are led to the prosier but still-airy texts of the early 80s, which prefigure the turn to the open ended, looping narration of the everyday achieved in her masterful book My Life. The poems collected in this volume, as well as her exhilarating preface (a crucial defence of poetry as revolutionary practise and radical hope), are shimmering evidence of Hejinian’s lifelong enquiry into the life of the mind as a form of living together in language.