This collection of new and selected poems by the former poet laureate of Alaska, Tom Sexton, opens a door on the essence of life in Alaska and Maine. Sexton divides his year between the two states, and he captures here the small but powerful sensual details of day-to-day life in these contrasting, yet similar, environs. His carefully crafted verse distills the birch and aspen, lynx and ptarmigan, and the snow on high peaks. Through his poems we thrill to encounters with the wild, the seasons, and the sublime landscape. From 'At East Machais': The moon's pale light is a ghost in a white shift moving downhill past houses that mirror its whiteness as it goes. If a door opens, it will enter as it always has.