If by Song

If by Song is a poetry of loneliness, grief, love, joy, and self-confrontation. Its music comes as much from movement of mind and feeling as from technical and syntactic inventiveness. The volume is organized into sections of related poems, and the book is itself a coherent whole. A small section of translations includes poems from ancient Greek and Latin, as well as Anglo-Saxon riddles. Though a first collection by Marcia Karp, the work is the work of years, and is both artistic and mature.