The Berry and the Bee

Sheila Dietz confronts experience with the acuteness and steadfastness we associate with poets such as Hopkins and Transtromer. Like them, she understands her investigations of the natural world and the workings of memory can offer a glimpse of divinity at one moment, and a reckoning with dread in the next. Dietz writes wise and self-assured poems, noteworthy for striking metaphors, for bravura skill with the line and with syntax, and for a sure and steady command of autobiographical narrative. These are the poems of a mature and fearless poet, a writer of the very first order. -- David Wojahn