Throughout Things and Flesh, there is a wonderful sense of song, a kind of ringing up and down the scales of being. Here, Linda Gregg engages with the searches and findings of both the intellect and the body. This is poetry beautiful in its attention to the things and flesh of this world, to a life of passionate maturity and substance and the mysteries found within.

Loss is a constant companion in Things and Flesh as the poet explores what lesson can be found in "the way this new silence lasts." What all the poems accomplish is to carry the grief we must all by nature endure. They carry our grief across boundaries, over time, and perhaps even beyond, into what used to be called "salvation"--but which Gregg now indicates is instead the place where poetry is made. the consolations are hard won, but no less triumphant.

Things and Flesh is a collection that again demonstrates how, as Joseph Brodsky said of her earlier work, "The blinding intensity of Ms. Gregg's lines stain the reader's psyche the way lightning or heartbreak do."