Allison shows how poetry -- poetic knowing and seeing -- can reveal aspects of the world invisible to science. Three lucid chapters describe the path to true imagination, where attention is the key. First we must practice it, then we must become aware of the processes involved in it. Learning to experience "poise, " we must come to terms with the shadow -- or all that says "No" in us. The combination of attention, equanimity and assent opens the world in a new way.

Allison then examines how poets have actually developed and practiced the kind of "deep seeing" that "image work" involves. For this he draws on William Shakespeare, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Octavio Paz. The book concludes with a sequence of the author's own poems that exemplify the philosophy and practice he has been unfolding.