Jane Cooper was born in 1924 and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and Princeton, New Jersey. Her first collection of poems, "The Weather of Six Mornings", received the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1968. "Maps & Windows" followed in 1974 and, in 1979, the chapbook "Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison". In 1978 she was co-recipient of the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America. 'What poetry must do', she has written, 'is alert us to a truth, and it must be necessary; once it exists, we realize how much we needed exactly this'. "Scaffolding" presents Jane Cooper's new and selected poems gathered over three and a half decades, together with a remarkable autobiographical essay which goes to the heart of the conflicts associated with being a woman and a poet of her generation. Through its generous, imaginative and scrupulous attention to social and artistic truths, Jane Cooper's writing has never been more necessary.