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A favorite book that has influenced me? Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I discovered Millay when I was eleven and she made me want to write. She took me through the heartbreak of adolescence, she consoled me through deaths and disappointments as I grew older, she sustains me now in middle age. (The next time someone you love has a near brush with death, read "Thanksgiving Dinner" and feel the exaltation of that "and did not.") As a lyric poet she cares about meter, complex rhyme schemes and poetic images; yet her language is very clear, she uses homely images chosen from nature and she is completely accessible, which is probably why she's dismissed and undervalued by so many academics. (Like the King James Bible, she requires no priestly interpreter.) Her poems quickly spring to the universal, but they are rooted in the particular. A flower is not a flower. It is a spiked larkspur, a yellow violet, a specific blue flag in a bog. It isn't the scent of generic herbs, it's tansy or sweet basil or old-fashioned sage and it brings me immediately into her garden, into a sensuous landscape I can taste, touch, hear, see and smell. I am told that my books have a strong sense of place. If so, I learned it from Millay.

Reviewed by Margaret M., Author

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