Autumn in the Alaska Range

These are poems of the natural world, of light and dark and the changing of the seasons. We find Tu Fu chanting a poem deep in the Alaska Range, a man who becomes a bear during his morning walk, a world of light carved from a piece of ivory, and walruses in their home beneath the ocean deciding if they will offer themselves to a hunter. Not all of the poems are set in Alaska. There are poems about growing up in a decaying mill town, the suicide of the poet’s mother and how the past is always with us. However, Sexton returns again and again to the conviction that the world itself is sacred – an ancient belief we need to recover.