What Do We Know

What Do We Know was published by Da Capo in 2002, and the title is not rhetorical. The book is an inventory of what looking closely at the world actually establishes.

Forty poems and prose poems, arranged around a handful of verbs: observing, searching, pausing, being astonished, giving thanks. The natural world is everywhere in them, held both as a set of unrepeatable moments and as a set of cycles that will go on without anybody watching.

The images are among her most exact. A hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day. Bees that have memorised every stalk and leaf in a field. And against all that specificity she sets the line that the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact, which is the book's real position.

Sixty-eight pages, continuing the mixed verse-and-prose form of White Pine and West Wind. Stanley Kunitz called it a blessing.