Linda Annas Ferguson knows-to borrow Wallace Stevens' formulation-that "Death is the mother of beauty." She proclaims in one of her poems, "Everything / is drenched with endings, alive with dying." Her work exists at the shimmering mid-point between an urge to celebrate the world's beauty and a pained recognition that this beauty is mutable. She recognizes that our being only temporary inhabitants of this life is not a problem to solve but a mystery to feel-and a mystery that compels us to make poems. As she wryly puts it, she is "dying to write / a decent poem." Linda Annas Ferguson has done...