In this impressive collection of new poems, Janice Kulyk Keefer explores the fragility and power of human relationships. Her intelligence is evident in finely crafted lyrics that celebrate a daughter’s deep affection for her parents; the enduring love of husband and wife; the tenderness of a mother toward her sons; and the abiding pleasures of female friendship. Keefer’s appreciation for the past infuses several poems that posit an imagined connection between herself and other women, both writers and non-writers.

Many of the poems in the volume’s first section are dedicated to those whose stories they evoke. Always interested in how one’s ancestral past informs the present, Keefer links her mother’s painful childhood in the Ukraine to her taste for oranges. In another poem, a sculptor whose parents fled Poland years earlier works her clay to resemble her “mother’s lost, lifted face.” For Keefer, writing is often a means of managing memories. To render the past in poems is to transmute it and somehow make it bearable.

Section two includes poems written in the imagined voices of women as diverse as Eurydice, Mary Magdalene, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Smart. In language and imagery that transcend time, Keefer’s interpretation of each woman’s view of herself is entirely convincing. In the long poetic sequence, “Isle of Demons,” the poet explores the legendary fate of a young French noblewoman who was abandoned on the small island after forming an illicit liaison with an officer on her voyage out to New France. The most haunting of the collection, these poems enter the mind of a woman who falls victim to the unyielding, patriarchal mores of the time.

Keefer’s work is characterized by its precise imagery and warm, clear tone, which mark the third section dedicated to her husband. In this series, the speaker takes unabashed delight in the intimacy of marital love and the sustaining joy of family. Despite the vagaries of day-to-day life, she is “looking out for us / with the eyes of love.”