The Ripening Light

*The Ripening Light* marks Lucile Adler's visible return to the first rank of practicing American poets. In 1967 she made a notable debut with *The Traveling Out and Other Poems* and followed with *The Society of Anna*. Then a long silence, except occasionally a poem in a magazine. But as the poems in this new selection make clear to us, it was only a public sort of silence, and within it Adler has continued to speak of those things that matter. The strengths that were hers in the first two books -- a wise eye, a compassionate heart, a sense that grace in this world is so hard to attain -- are here too. Here they are tempered and toned with the passage of personal and communal time, with grief, loss, the unquiet serenity that comes from a careful attention to the Old Procession. The light of The Ripening Light is a darker light and a richer one.