“Among these brave poems, two stand out – for their beautifully placed, speakable cadences, their light touch, their transcendent vision. In ‘Journeying West’ the pioneer women are purged of the appurtenances of the old life until, empty, they come to stand before the new life’s open sea. For ‘The White Queen,’ memory loss circles, meanders, stops, starts, becomes a via negativa leading away from the merely actual of memory and desire to imagination’s new world of the freely possible – which must appear to the reader, still burdened with memory, like the White Queen herself, just ‘silly and confused and showering / silver hairpins.”
