The voice of these poems is clear and strong, rising as it does out of the earth to "the celebrations of the reeds," living simply and daily among cat-tail, wren, peacock, children, women, "praising the coals of heaven" before settling back like the old men of boyhood "wifeless and half wild, / In stained coats, dying like rainbows / from the feet up." These are poems of the real triumphs we seldom understand, the visions of dawn and dusk over the fields and cities where we live, poems that finally embrace even the emptiness "tasting its bitten face." The book also includes a group of superb...

Here are twenty-one poems yoked by thought and language to the filial bond and set in motion by the looming death of a cold and distant father. Whether physically absent or emotionally estranged, the father in these poems has always been a dominating, difficult presence in the lives of his family: the daughter run wild, the son who has disappointed, the wife he never did marry. Watching his father ebb away, the poet wonders at the man's ornery and cantankerous reality even in the face of death - and at his own newfound sense of power. But as well, he searches for a bond, an acknowledgment...

Pamela Painter] is a writer who seems to revel in setting herself new challenges, in trying to get inside a host of different characters who move through vastly different worlds. Even within a single story, she can slide effortlessly from one character's point of view to another's.... This is a virtuoso performance, graceful and brave and full of feeling. aAlicia Baker, The NewYork Times

Upon publication of The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir in 1973, Richard Howard wrote, "Richard Hugo's concern is the unenviable, the unenviable, the unvisited, even the univiting, which he must invest with his own deprivation, his own private war. . . . Each poem adds its incisive particulars to the general stoic wreck; but what startles, then reassures in all this canon of the inconsolable, the unsanctified, the dispossessed, is Hugo's poetics, the analogy of language to experience. . . . Richard Hugo is such an important poet because the difficulties inherent in his art provide him a means...