Mary Willette Hughes’s third collection shows the poet at the height of her powers to appreciate the munificence of a long and well-lived life. Her voice is warm and wise in the knowledge that ‘Every moment of light and dark is a miracle,’ as Walt Whitman wrote. The poems are animated by a loving, generous, grateful sensibility. Some keen with the sharpness of loss. Hughes writes of long-married love, the husband and wife ‘faithful as mountains,’ and of a friend in a hospice room requesting that wilted flowers remain as ‘they are teaching me to die.’ Hughes’s quick and appreciative eye and nimble writing style give us images of birds, grandchildren, spring mornings, harvests, poetry therapy sessions, butterflies in the snow and things round and ripe, such as a female body. The poet has inherited a love of poetry from her mother, and she passes it along to us-lucky us.
- Margaret Haase, author ofMilk and Tides, winner of the Midwest Book Award for Poetry in 2009.