White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems

White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems was published by Harcourt Brace in 1994, two years after the National Book Award.

Forty pieces, eighteen of them not published before. The concerns are the ones that hold across her whole career: the silky bonds between a person and the natural world, the plain delight of writing, and the value of silence, which she treats as a discipline rather than an absence.

What is new here is the form. This is where she starts letting prose poems sit alongside the lineated ones, and the looser shape suits the more discursive turns her thinking was taking. It carried into West Wind three years later.

James Dickey said she works a true spell unlike any other poet's. That is close to right about this book in particular: it is quieter than American Primitive and stranger than the later, more consoling work.