English Summary/英文概要： In this strong, appealing collection, Nancy Willard shares her passion for observing the mysteries of the natural world, particularly the flora and fauna of Cape Cod and the Hudson Valley, where many of these poems are set. We see, through her eyes, the coming of darkness to an empty orchard, the retreat of deer at dusk, and the breakup of a river with the onset of spring. Willard is also deeply engaged with the living creatures that populate her world. Her poems record her encounter with a moon snail and her celebration of the ladybugs she sends into the garden and the butterflies that alight on her shoulders like ghostly kisses.

Amid poems about the intimate presence of nature are expressions of absences deeply felt. Willard is drawn not just to the inhabited world but also to the empty spaces with which our passage through life is strewn. In “The Absence at the Swing,” a rabbit watches a swing’s back-and-forth motion just after the children have left the playground; in “Niche Without Statue,” she takes us to “an alcove scoured / to stucco light” and tells us, “Somebody lived here. Stepped away. No tracks.” We learn, too, of the presences she misses most deeply, as in “Phone Poem,” in which she imagines receiving a telephone call from her father after his death.

Whether she is cultivating a sense of the life that is all around her or attending to the losses felt within, Nancy Willard never ceases to enchant us with the sense of dedication and awe that graces her verse. Amid poems about the intimate presence of nature are expressions of absences deeply felt. Willard is drawn not just to the inhabited world but also to the empty spaces with which our passage through life is strewn. In “The Absence at the Swing,” a rabbit watches a swing’s back-and-forth motion just after the children have left the playground; in “Niche Without Statue,” she takes us to “an alcove scoured / to stucco light” and tells us, “Somebody lived here. Stepped away. No tracks.” We learn, too, of the presences she misses most deeply, as in “Phone Poem,” in which she imagines receiving a telephone call from her father after his death.

Whether she is cultivating a sense of the life that is all around her or attending to the losses felt within, Nancy Willard never ceases to enchant us with the sense of dedication and awe that graces her verse.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 在这部极具吸引力的典藏级中，南希•威拉德和读者们分享了她对神奇自然世界强烈感知，特别是对科德角和哈德逊山谷的植物群和动物区系的观察，书中有许多诗，均涉及于此。 我们通过作者的眼睛，从黑暗到一处空荡的果树园，黄昏时夜归的鹿，以及春天到来时一条沉寂冰封河流的解体。威拉德也置身于这大千世界中。 她的诗记录下了，一轮明月下蜗牛缓缓移动的景象，庭院内瓢虫的到来，以及蝴蝶亲吻她的肩膀的如诗美景。(Sandy)

Awards/获奖情况： “Willard crafts verse so well that even her less successful poems are impressive, and her best poems seem unsurpassably good. The elegy for an ’ancient lady,’ ’The Way She Left Us,’ plays the modern game of skirting religion with consummate artistry and feeling. Bright and precisely detailed, ’The House,’ which considers how the poet has recreated her mother’s ’house made of talk’ and kept it open, like her father’s ’house...made of sky,’ to the wonders of the universe, achieves the kind of photography of the spirit to which so much imagism aspires. The narrative ’Love in America’ gets to the heart of an elopement, circa 1970, as well as prose ever could. In just three quatrains with only three erratically placed end rhymes among them, ’The Migration of Bicycles’ is as ludicrously, portentously funny about its twowheeled subject as Irish comic genius Flann O’Brien’s entire novel THE THIRD POLICEMAN (1967). These four masterpieces are matched by several others in this invaluable collection.”- Booklist

“Willard’s tender, careful 10th volume of verse for adults...returns to the gardens, riversides, parables, and Northeastern landscapes whose patterns she has made her own....Outdoors as well as in, Willard...finds symbols of loneliness and family loyalty, evidence of deaths and absences, along with hints of divine presence....Admirers of Roethke may find here one of his heirs; fans of Annie Dillard or Mary Oliver may encounter in Willard’s verse subtler articulations of the attitudes they already love.”- Publisher’s Weekly

Nancy Willard is the author of two novels, Things Invisible to See and Sister Water, and eleven previous books of poetry, including Swimming Lessons: New and Selected Poems. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and poetry, and her book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers was awarded the Newbery Medal. She teaches in the English department at Vassar College and lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with her husband, the photographer Eric Lindbloom.