Without My Asking: Poetry: Notable Voices

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90’s petition—“teach us to number our days.” That biblical sense of limits—of what we can know and not know—and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives—from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder—these poems work to utter “Yes” to all that happens, that “peculiar affirmative” that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, ”Life’s like that . . . also death.”