Why We Make Gardens - & Other Poems Author:Jeanne Larsen Jeanne Larsen offers us poems filled with sustenance and surprise. In precise, meditative language, she investigates a full range of experience and feeling, from bodily desire to rage to astonishment at the wonders (and betrayals) we find in the world. Some poems grow out of visits to the homes of such writers as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and... more » Anne Spencer, searching out what we might gather from the lives they cultivated, and from their art. Others draw us into gardens of the heart and mind, enacting the continual inconstancies of language and the passions. All celebrate elemental things: the dreamlike, palpable nature of what we perceive, the twin gifts of familiarity and strangeness, the astounding human capacity for seeing, or creating, likenesses. Here is a poet perceptive and skilled. Here is a book where each poem is a garden, a rhythmic field of change, an artificial paradise, a time-marked place of pleasure and renewal.« less