68 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews If this were all, though, the book would be merely nostalgic, but Buckley (again close to Wordsworth) complicates and enriches these memories with the perspectives of a “philosophic mind” brought by the years, of which Wordsworth speaks in his famous ode. A life has been lived in the meantime, and the poet confronts the sea, the vastness of space, the black wall that awaits the end of old age, and his own beginnings. The search, then, becomes less for time lost than for meaning from life lived. “It seems we continue to retrace the footprints / of each grief we left along theshore,neverreallysure/ofourbusiness here beyond the immeasurable / summation of the light where my heart, most of its road work / done, proves useless against the night.” In this passage , we hear uncertainty and despair in the poet’s position. Is there something, then? Anything ? Perhaps, but the varieties of religious experience are not, of course, orthodox. The book signals this at the beginning when it quotes Einstein: “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. . . . This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” In the title poem, toward the end of the book, the poet finds that the “religious” arises perhaps most poignantly when his mother is dying in a hospice and he has to leave “her for an hour or so each day / to feed her lonesome dog, / . . . when one afternoon / a roadrunner appeared / out of thin air, / out of the rocks and cactus, / came up onto the lawn, cocked his head / and looked at me / with the glistening dark star of his eye. / And I went up to him, / bequeathing bits of chicken / I’d cooked for the dog, / and the roadrunner / soon knew me / by my whistle, / by a litany / of little clicks I made / and the sound of the garage door ascending, / and he would wait under the oleander / for my daily offering.” In the desert landscape, kindness flowers, and when it does, the ordinary, the mundane is elevated . Does the poet create or discover the religious, the redemptive, through his acts of kindness toward the lonely, the hungry? “Bequeathing,” “litany,” “ascending,” “offering”—all arise out of “that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love” (Wordsworth, “Lines”). Even a land of rock and cactus can thereby be transformed. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Kristiina Ehin. 1001 Winters. Ilmar Lehtpere, tr. Fayetteville, New York. Bitter Oleander. 2012. isbn 9780978633585 Kristiina Ehin’s voluminous bilingual (the original Estonian and English translation) collection of one hundred poems is permeated with the feeling of a need for closeness with the Other, a fellow being, and an interior dialogue with the invisible companion. The title evokes associations with Scheherazade—the poems can be read as fascinating little tales narrated in the long, dark winters, the time that stories were usually told on country homesteads. References to the richness of Estonia’s nature and the specific customs and traditions—as well as tragic memories —of the country’s rural past abound, leaving impressions of the recent surface thin. Befitting the author’s education in Estonian and comparative folklore , numerous mythical and magic motifs suggest an ancient lyrical epic heritage along with intertextual references to the ballads of earlier poets (“Woman of Gold,” “Swan Bone City,” “My Sisters the Ravens,” “Cows Come from the Sea,” the figures of sea mother and sea maidens). The sensual intimacy that shapes the poems reflects the speaker’s responsiveness to the modeling influence of her native surroundings, her time, and the male presences in her life: “fidelity—rough as a man’s cheek / raw meat that draws you close / a trail that remains / a trail that can’t be abandoned.” With the intensifying effect of a folk performer, the author employs alliteration, invocation of primeval phenomena, and repetition of phrases and stanzas (“Carriongreen ”). There are rare instances of rhymes among the free verse in the original, as in “Püssimees seisab õues” (The gunman stands in the yard), which are not transmitted in the translation. In the vein of the long line of Estonian women poets, Ehin’s poems delineate a background of...