Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I have been asked worse questions.

This came into the house as a present from my sister, who by now knows exactly which shelf of me to reach for, and it has lived on the arm of the chair since February.

You are not supposed to read a collected poems straight through like a novel. I did it anyway, over about eleven weeks, three or four poems at a time with the tea going cold beside me, and I will admit that doing it that way exposes the one real criticism I have of her, which is that she goes back to the same well an awful lot. The geese. The pond. The morning. The grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand. Read one and it opens a window in your chest; read forty on the trot and you begin to hear the machinery, the little turn at the end where the natural world hands you a lesson wrapped up in dew.

That is not a small complaint and it is why this is an eight and not a ten. There were evenings when I thought, quite gently, all right Mary, another heron.

But then — then you come to The Summer Day, or Wild Geese, and it does not matter in the least what you noticed the evening before, because the woman is standing there telling you that you do not have to be good, that you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting, and the top of your head comes off. I have had a very hard couple of years, for reasons I am not going to put on a book website, and Wild Geese did more for me in February than several things that cost considerably more money.

Her real subject is Attention. Paying it. Keeping paying it. She writes somewhere that attention is the beginning of devotion, and that sentence has quietly rearranged the way I walk the dog. I now know what a kingfisher sounds like going past. I did not know that in January. That is entirely her doing and I do not think I will lose it.

The book itself is a lovely object, thick and blue and heavy, the sort of thing that looks well on a table, and she chose the running order herself very late in her life, going backwards through the decades, which gives you the odd experience of watching a poet get younger as you go along. By the end you are in the nineteen sixties with a young woman in the woods at Provincetown who does not yet know that any of the rest of it is coming.

Eight, and it stays on the arm of the chair. Best read four poems at a time, at night, with the house quiet. Not eleven weeks straight through like an idiot.