In this beautiful book of poems, which gives voice to unspeakable loss, Katherine Barrett Swett enlivens and animates old forms and makes them sing anew.  Hers is a dazzling contemporary poetics, in which, in a wry, adroit crown of sonnets, based on paintings by Vermeer, “a grace note struck…shimmers like a pearl.” These poems bring to mind Mona Van Duyn’s stately, syncopated verses, tempered with flashes of humor and verbal derring-do and delineate not only dark places but also the pleasures of a long marriage, sitting out on a summer evening, watching the firefly’s “disco frenzy…impossible to trace with just the eye.”  A marvelous collection.

—Cynthia Zarin