A Howling

Blair's wonderfully sensual poems teem with animals and insects who soothe and torment, whose lives and deaths complement and foreshadow joys and sorrows, as the speaker copes with the decline and loss of loved ones: "can there be any/ ecstasy/ like a cardinal/ in a birdbath/ unaware/ of the cat below," which precedes the poem bearing news of her sister's stage four diagnosis. The oneness yields a profound acceptance, as when rotting salmon bodies feed "the future with their pasts,/ bridging life with death/ with life again." -April Ossmann