There is a cleanness to Marston’s work that makes it seem like worked stone, as if everything unnecessary had been stripped away from it. Author of the award-winners Talking Soft Dutch (1984) and Eva-Mary (1991) and a major contributor to Cowboy Poetry Matters [BKL My 1 00], Marston melds narrative and lyric so that even the tiniest of poems provides an opening to stories concerned with her main theme, intimacies shared and lost--that is, how people connect and how they heal and hurt one another in such connections.

Marston’s connected people include neighbors, drunk in a pub, who watch a bereaved man "with smiles that shine communal and benign"; and a desolated lover in whom "every door to her soul was open." Stripped and bare as they are, Marston’s poems yet are musical, containing voices calling and answering to each other despite all obstacles. Although loss is palpable in it, this is ultimately a majestically hopeful book. Patricia Monaghan