Thomas and Beulah

I had always wanted to choose a book of poetry for Phinney by Post, and I knew, when we did, it would be one in which the poems truly made a book, something Dove leaves no doubt about at the beginning of hers: "These poems tell two sides of a story, and are meant to be read in sequence," she declares in boldface. The sequence is "Thomas" and then "Beulah," two halves that imagine the lives, mostly in Ohio, of her grandfather and grandmother, but as I've read the sequences over and over, they've gained their value to me by knocking against each other, as different moments speak to me, and to each other, two lives gaining their shapes from moments held in memory, fleeting and forward-borne.