The Cinema of Poetry emphasizes the vibrant world of European cinema in addition to incorporating the author's long abiding concerns on American avant-garde cinema.

Informed by the criticism of iconic filmmaker Pier Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry offers spirited explorations of poetry's influence on classic films by Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrey Tarkovsky. It also highlights how avant-garde films made by Joseph Cornell, Lawrence Jordan, Jerome Hiler, Gregory Markopoulos, and others found rich, unexpected sources of inspiration in a diverse group of poets that includes Stephane Mallarme, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, and Aeschylus. Written with verve and panache, it represents the culmination of P. Adams Sitney's career-long fascination with the intersection of poetry, film, and the avant-garde.

There is no other book that I know of that treats the cinema of poetry in both its European and American manifestations, and no other work that has offered the depth of insight into the European cinema of poetry that Sitney has. The Cinema of PoetryR is simply an outstanding piece of work-it is elegant, lucid, taut, and penetrating.