I knew Yiddish was exquisitely expressive, with a particular affinity for proverbs and curses and jokes, and more words for “fool” than Hawaiians have for lava or the Inuit people for snow. I had no idea of the wealth of its poetry.

Just as no self-respecting woman in the Forties would attend church in pedal pushers, the poem tells us, neither would she enter a church “veiled and ambling in on a she-ass.”

The larger question driving the poems of "Approaching Ice," which examines the lives of many historic polar explorers, was to figure out just this: why they went. Why, knowing the difficulties, did they go?

Today’s poem for Veterans Day does more than just pay homage to soldiers fallen in battle; it also carries an implicit critique of the wars that give rise to such battles.

The poem is more broadly about the struggle of the speaker to separate from her mother and be born as an individual, and of course, about the same conflict confronted by all mothers and daughters throughout time.

“All Hallows Eve, Edgewater Inn” is both an occasional poem about Halloween and a pastoral poem, one where a speaker’s contemplation of a natural landscape triggers inner reflection.

The poem’s opening introduces a wonderful pun—the word “seems.” It’s a kind of doubling that characterizes the poem as a whole, and through it we come to see sewing a seam as a metaphor for something larger—the domestic life, the life relegated to women as a whole in the nineteenth century.

What is happening to Salvadoran refugees in this country today are the threads that weave the rich, tragic tapestry of today’s poem.