In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond's poems, they "brim with what the whole world knows."

Entering History opens on a middle-aged couple, modern-day travelers in an ancient setting. The collection follows their relationship through time and place, combining the personal and the historical in stories of the family--siblings, a daughter, and the very different marriage of the poet's parents.

The marriage poems share the intimacy, erotic playfulness,...