The Ghost of Eden

Vividly realized, emotionally gripping, these poems of Chase Twichell's confront the crucial issue of our times: the death of nature as we have known it. The Adirondacks, with their beauties and dangers, are the setting for many of the poems. They are inhabited by the fox, the bear, the fishercat. One is rabid, another dead, the third a life-sustaining dream. The "ghost" is both the shadow of the paradise we have so carelessly ruined, and the poet herself, from whom the elegy for it is wrenched. These are dark poems, frontal and unflinching, but they are illuminated by the poet's powerful love for the earth, and by the heightened, surprising joys forced from a new intimacy with her own mortality.