The poetry of Eileen Berry distills recollection into its essence, and this present collection reminds us once again of how good she is at this. As she plunges into deepest memory, her images are so powerful, we are helpless not to go with her. We are in the house at Marshside, "always cold especially in summer when no fires were lit, and the air felt thin;" we are there in the dry, overheated desert; we are at the funeral when there was "a silence . . . more full than sound." Eileen Berry provides for us a time and place that we did not know but through her unerring pitch and exquisite...