Read this book of poems in the morning so you can think about it all day. Jeanette Hinds goes leaping over nostalgia to the miracle inside memory. "We knew our duty toward cows," she tells us. She captures not just present-time feelings about the past, but more importantly, the feeling of the old days, and she brings that past feeling up into present clarity.

I have seldom read anything as moving as her latter-day grief at the smallness of her mother's world, a "four-walled island" in which Hinds can now gratefully understand her mother's generous nudges toward knowledge of a far wider world. This is a book about learning, learning from books and from the lives of family and neighbors, learning that the world is full of contrasts and that neither member of a contrasting pair is superior to the other.

This is also a book about preserving the names, the personalities, the activities of a family and its environs. Any family is lucky to have a preserver who thinks, feels, speaks, and sings like Jeanette Hinds. Her daughter Jane's photographs, clear and matter-of-fact, provide important and vivid contrast that supplies context for the lyricism of the poems.