In an entry for Contemporary Authors after she had published her first collection of poems, Betty Adcock wrote, "I care about people, our failings, our deaths and the real earth. I have no program for salvation." The statement quietly reveals two of the continuing concerns of her poetry: her fascination with the compelling stories that people tell by living out their lives and her tough refusal to lean on some transcendent deus ex machina as a rescue from inescapable suffering. In order to transform those stories into poems--always written with a luminous economy--Adcock has probed family history and looked hard back into the Big Thicket area of southeast Texas, where she was born and spent her childhood.

Elizabeth Sharp Adcock was born on 16 September 1938 in San Augustine, Texas, the daughter of Ralph L. Sharp, a landowner, and Sylvia Hudgins Sharp, a teacher of Latin and English. She graduated...