Ambrosia: Love Poems chronicles one man's devotion to his wife over the course of decades of marriage, children, birthdays, stories, tests, promises, foibles, delights, treks, and sacraments. In poems effusive and spare, sacred and mundane, formal and free, this collection does what the poet Richard Hugo once suggested poetry should do: run the risk of sentimentality without becoming overly sentimental. These poems devote themselves to that line of feeling, knowing when to veer away from it, when to hold it in check, and when to explore it in every way.