Eastern Mountain Time by Joyce Peseroff

Donald Hall recommends Eastern Mountain Time, poems by Joyce Peseroff: "These poems are local and universal, intimate accounts of landscape and people—with an almost pervasive shadow of elegy. In 'The Ridge' she makes a tableau of the dead, from a friend to a father. Always loss is mixed with joy, especially in the natural world—no joy without loss, no loss without joy. Her language is dense as she loads every rift, and her demotic speech carries weight by its close packing. As with many good poets, she has an accurate ear and eye for the end of a poem. She never explains what she has just done, but finishes the poem with a leap that persuasively unites her themes, reconciling the unreconcilable. She brings up together with down as the human psyche does—and as poetry must do to be true and beautiful together." (Carnegie Mellon)