Habitats

Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb's robust new collection, is her best yet-a field guide to the pleasures and perils of adulthood, a reckoning with what is and what will never be. Moving through disappointment and joy, divorce and remarriage, the death of parents and a stare down with her own allotted time on Earth, Whitcomb seeks out or stumbles into rooms of reflection, landscapes that enlarge us, gardens and clearings where "lean and stubborn devotions" take root. These lush and rugged poems are alive to the "tug of memory / awake in everything," those habitats of geography and mind that clarify and define what is most important-belonging to ourselves. "Not young or uncomplicated or down-to-earth," Whitcomb is both realist and dreamer, uncovering the "mercy in each minute of the sense's deft erasure." Niche by niche, line by line, she "persists in loving the world," finding wherever she looks a certain hard-won grace, not wanting to be "anyone or anywhere else." Habitats is many worlds at once-a marvelous journey into the powers of ordinary witness and a testament of the courage to change.