I remember exactly when I bought this book. DH and I had gone out to Nantucket the summer of my senior year in college. We went on the ferry and spent the day riding rented bikes around the island. I couldn't believe how quaint it was:shingled houses, gray from the weather and covered with rosebushes, beaches sheltered by grassy dunes, and a downtown full of little shops, including a book store where I fingered volumes of poetry, settling for this one. That night on the ferry back I remember sitting with my back up it's metal hull reading poem after poem, a certain hunger in me quenched. The span of Bly's poems in this collection (as in many of his collections) is huge: he speaks with the deeply personal voice of a man in love, caught up in nature, and then with the voice of a philosopher and activist, watching our country lurch forward, and saying words about it that might make all the difference.