A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision

Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin's five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images-the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers-and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness-shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion-its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy-her first and truest subject.