New and Selected Poems, Volume Two

New and Selected Poems, Volume Two was published by Beacon Press in 2005, thirteen years after the volume that won her the National Book Award.

It carries forty-two new poems, which is a full collection in itself, alongside sixty-nine she picked from six of the books she had published since. Together they cover roughly the second half of a working life that ran close to five decades.

The selection is worth reading as a selection. The poems drawn from Why I Wake Early are full of white things and untrimmable light; the ones from Owls and Other Fantasies bring watery sound, singing, rain; West Wind supplies the starry distances and the travelling. Set side by side, the books stop looking interchangeable.

At 192 pages it is the natural companion to Volume One, and between them the two volumes are the fullest account of her work she assembled before Devotions.