An Ear in Bartram’s Tree, a selection made by Jonathan Williams himself, includes 158 poems written over the ten-year period 1957-67; it was first published in hard cover by the University of North Carolina Press in 1969. Amusing, satirical and witty, Williams has yet been called “the most lyrical of young poets”––evidence of the great range of mood and style at which he excels. Also varying, from the academic all the way to the ironic, are the elaborate notes appended to the poems in this volume. The title of the collection celebrates the early American naturalist William Bartram’s discovery of that rarest of native trees, Franklinia Alatamaha, which has not been seen in the wild since 1803.