England to Venice, finding in the byways and accidents of travel the ghostly presences that mark the poet’s passage from youth half-forgotten to the edge of old age: the younger self that, like some heroine in Henry James, she catches glimpses of and barely recognizes; the long-dead poets unable to sleep, with things still on their mind. The elegies threaded through this mature, startling book recognize life moving toward the shadows—these are poems of old responsibilities and new virtues, looking back as a way of looking forward.

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