In this collection Jane Gentry evokes, in images as haunting as the Kentucky landscape, a garden thriving with the flowers of memory, a physical world that reflects a realm of transcendence. Cosmic harmony reveals itself in the "ciphers" of roots and worms, in a piece of blue-willow china - "a blaze of balance, of wholeness" - that survives a fire in which a lonely, tormented cousin died. Like John Donne and Elizabeth Bishop, Gentry finds beauty, grandeur, and the suggestion of immortality in the smallest, most evanescent of details. A mother's clothes. Scents. Textures. The play of moonlight...

These rich, lyrical poems, written by Jane Gentry over ten years, register the resonance between the poet's inner being and the outer world's everyday events. Moments of insight-gained while watching a roofer at work next door, napping with the cat, reading on the porch, carrying the laundry, or strolling the aisles of Sam's Club-expose the bright bones of the swiftness of time's passage, reminding us to stay attentive. Gentry's poems are deeply grounded in the continuity of family and homeplace yet also embrace new experiences. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the beautiful, the paradox...