Alcyone

Alcyone burns “immeasurably old, immeasurably far,” its light crossing a void strewn with the dust of dead worlds. Against that vastness, the poem asks what a human life can be—and what it dares to seek.

In this late-19th-century collection, Archibald Lampman moves from thawing roads and the song sparrow’s springtime arrival to a city of roaring furnaces, iron figures, and unending night. His poems find intimacy in a father’s delight in his daughter, and solitude beside a quiet stream; again and again, the natural world opens onto questions of time, spirit, and our place in the universe. What might a distant star reveal about the restless, tender lives beneath it?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.