NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

The poems in this collection include selections from several earlier works, and most of the poems written in the three years since publication of the writer's last book. It is a big collection, and an easy-going one. There is a New England folk-tale simplicity and reality in the language, landscapes full of seas, farms, and apple trees, as well as personal histories and more personal emotions, all described in precise yet unobtrusive images and rhythms. The tone is deliberately casual and open, giving the more personal poems, and particularly the love poems, a quiet, moving intensity. The subjects are also quiet: people, scapes, incidents caught in revealing minor lights, seen from a mature, contemplative wisdom that casts them in altering perspectives, at once small and specific, and universal. An attractive collection in which a sense of life's transient loveliness, an edge of sadness, prevails.