George Bradley was born in Roslyn, New York, in 1953 and was educated at Yale University and the University of Virginia. Among the awards his work has received are the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize (1985, judge James Merrill). He is the author of four previous collections of verse – Terms to Be Met (1986), Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (1991), The Fire Fetched Down (1996), and Some Assembly Required (2001) – and was editor of The Yale Younger Poets Anthology (1998). Besides writing books, Bradley has been occupied in many ways – as a construction worker (installing foam insulation), as a copy-writer (on staff at several small advertising companies in New York City), as a sommelier (at The American Hotel in Sag Harbor, Long Island, a restaurant with 650 wines on the list, 15,000 bottles in the cellar, and vintages going back to the 1800s), and as an editor (cleaning up translations from the Japanese for the Jack Tilton art gallery). Like most poets, he has also taught creative writing on occasion. Currently he imports and distributes La Bontà di Fiesole, a brand of olive oil made from the seven hundred trees on a family farm outside Florence and described by him as “the elixir of life.” When not on the farm, Bradley lives in Chester, Connecticut.

Books by George Bradley:

Other poems on the web by George Bradley:
Two poems
Ten poems
"A Poet in the Kitchen"
"Advisory"
"The kiss of death"

George Bradley According to Wikipedia.

About A Few of Her Secrets:

"The poems in George Bradley’s brilliant new collection have conspiratorial accents; we find ourselves drawn into unsettling confidences, disclosures at once playful and appalling. These are poems of great formal mastery and of elegant wit and yet the artistry is suavely unobtrusive; Bradley is a practitioner of that ‘piercing virtue’ which Emily Dickinson, another connoisseur of renunciation, extolled. His engagement with our popular culture is one of exasperated affection but he views our fads, our pastimes, our patterns of speech from the perspective of antiquity; he’s an American poet with what might be called a Roman cast of mind – reflected not only in his profoundly Virgilian sense of ‘a mortal rapture in all things’ but in seven poems of mouth-watering Italian recipes. The collection begins just outside the gates of Eden, guarded by ‘gladiate fire,’ and extends into an uneasy future. There is the best poem yet written on 9/11, ‘Advisory,’ a set of variations on September with its heartbreaking ‘baby blue’ sky. There are gnomic utterances, sudden aphorisms, ecstatic phrases that, as he suggests, ‘exfoliate the callus that facilitates evasion.’ Bradley is a learned poet; he deploys echoes of Milton and Auden and Christopher Smart, as well as the Bible, but does so with such wry panache that the allusions are continually refreshed. Each of this poet’s previous collections has been an event. A Few of Her Secrets may be his finest achievement yet. It is a rare pleasure in these unpropitious times to witness a poet exulting in all the registers of the language and having such enormous delight in his art."
—Eric Ormsby