Rutted Field of the Heart

This is a emotionally charged tribute to the author's late husband, detailing his life and death as well as his reappearance in various guises. Rooted in the elegance and reality of nature and family, Priscilla Ellsworth's poems become a gift, a primer on 'how to live / and how to die.' In an early poem she chides, 'Husband, wake up!' She is a wife who wants her husband's presence. Life: travel with family, work in the garden with him, the joy of his peonies - 'What if we had lived like this all our days?' Death arrives midway in the book: 'So this is it.' That single line, poignant, direct, straight to the heart. The poem 'Dawn Fire' which follows with its description of hunters and needless death takes one's breath away. In 'New Widow, ' when Ellsworth writes, 'For now my heart is a garden that cannot be turned, ' she keeps us in the rhythm of the natural world: for all its death, it will bring spring. Here are poems to trust."