This engaging poetic calendar has one item for each week of the year, fifty-one lyrical instances and a poignant preface. What obtains above all in these expressions of being-in-the-world is womanhood, in first and third persons, from girls and mothers to cosmopolitan travelers and grandmothers. Sentiment and intellect are balanced, as are statement and ellipsis. Absence and incompleteness complement presence and plenitude. Discovering images to make sense of the fragility of things and inexorable time.

Acute, fresh, potent, poems laced with imagination lighting images suffuse Sarett's elegantly crafted, quietly rendered, compendium of visions. This masterly poet expresses with rare presence the questions, aperçus, and memory entwined conversations that uncomfortably trail loss. If you are amidst the perplexities of later life to which fine poetry speaks best, you will whisper silent thanks.

She Has Visions is a romp, a risk and a ride through life, in which the sharp edges of everyday bump up against old standbys-art, history, film, literature and religion-that can no longer comfort us as we had hoped. The way that Carla Sarett deals with this disappointment is to sprinkle dashes of magical realism here and there in her fascinating poems. Patricia Gray, author of Rupture: poems