Hildegarde Flanner is a religious poet in an age when belief is most often coupled with doubt and a regional poet, a celebrator of the California landscape, at a time when her region as she knows it is "a vanishing land." Her poetry demonstrates the emergence of a modern sensibility: from its early romantic assurance it moves on to deal with modern doubt and disillusion. In 1979 Flanner described this evolution as a move from "romantic abstractions, possibly effective of their kind, but windy and regal" to "a smaller, stronger focus, perhaps on similar themes." She calls this focus "the worm's eye view, the pebble's eye view," yet she will not forget "God's eye view, you understand, for my earlier poetry contains religious writing which I miss now, since it was an ardent expression of my youth." While her religious sense has changed with time, it has not been...