
Elizabeth Macklin, whose poems have been described by The New Yorker as "graceful and halting, quartzlike in precision," contemplates the grammars of loss in her second collection of poems.

Here, in Elizabeth Macklin's second collection, an only child's responses to the fait accompli of childhood--decisions already made, accidents of history and family, patterns preset--come to the adult mind in the presence of change and grief. The mind regroups as it can: later...