This, Sarah Getty's third and final volume of poetry, takes us into her maturity and the beginnings of old age-which, like Moses, she was sadly destined to see only at a distance. It begins in darkness and the awareness of mortality (in her version of the ancient myth, Nut, the "aged dame," is "painted on the underside of coffin lids") but moves on to the beginning of new life in her celebration of her first grandchild. Then she explores the power of the female to give and sustain life, as well as to ward off death. Finally, the poet returns to one of the chief pleasures of her own too-short...