ELISE ASHER, born in Chicago, has been living in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts since 1948. The cover for this book is taken from one of her paintings. In 1994 she published, with The Sheep Meadow Press, The Visionary Gleam, a work of exploration and discovery where she juxtaposes forty-seven plates of her paintings with their source or parallels in the poems from the great tradition.