West Cemetery, Amherst

Ten poems reflecting on Amherst’s West Cemetery and our departed neighbor, Emily Dickinson, give this volume its title and its concluding section. They are preceded by children’s poems, dealing with the weather, good and bad, and such creatures as a mouse, an iguana, a dragon, a squirrel, and a peacock. There follows a substantial gathering of poems of varied focus, dealing with: love; human nature and relations among persons; nature—including weather and seasons and varied creatures with whom we share the earth; death; and poetry and the pleasure of words. Lewis C. Mainzer is author of: Two Wives Ago: Selected Poems (2009); A Rollicking Old-Age Song: New Poems (2012); Cain’s Punishment: Poems (2015); works in political science; and essays in the Massachusetts Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Yale Review. Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is former editor of Polity, the journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association