Moving from marriage to divorce, from motherhood to the death of a daughter, from love affairs to being a lover of solitude, Jane Ellen Glasser’s poems acknowledge pain not only as inescapable but, ironically, as necessary in opening the heart to beauty. Culled from five previous books, Jane Ellen Glasser: Selected Poems represents her finest work. Although over forty years Glasser’s tone shifts from darkness to the persistence of light, several themes endure. Nature, as a mirror for human nature, both informs and heals. Birds, particularly the egret, fly through these pages as talismans. Transformed through imagery and metaphor, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, art is recast in the brushstrokes of words, and inanimate objects and the dead are given voice. In her most recent work, disillusionment becomes acceptance, the imperfect becomes perfect, and the wound, to use Rumi’s words, is the place where the light enters you.