A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision
Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin's five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate imagesthe turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowersand a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousnessshaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passionits risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacyher first and truest subject.