Heaven with Others

Barbara Molloy's new collection Heaven with Others is a feast for the senses, as well as an elegiac reminder that all we have is the present. These poems study mortality: "As if it was not her at all, /dying, /abut to die, /being dead, /or returned to life..." ("Gift of Sunflowers"). In the hands of this accomplished lyricist even the most sordid past is rendered as fine art and gifted with visceral re-birth in organic images not easily forgotten: "Leaves strewn about the yards--/the exact color of church and rectory bricks..." (Breeze).