This slim volume is made up of poems composed over a period of years on a variety of themes as their significance rose, usually quite suddenly, into consciousness. Then came the poet's task of turning half-focused awareness into words, in the process that T.S. Eliot once aptly called "the marshalling of undisciplined squads of emotion." Apart from one short poem that was written as a jeu d'esprit for my daughter on her eighth birthday, all are...