"We share this soil with mutual wariness." This final line from one of Molly Holden's earlier poems, "The seven bushes," serves as epigraph for her achievement as a whole. As distinct from both the high modernism of Wallace Stevens's formulation ("man is the intelligence of his soil") and the equally extreme primitivism of its opposite ("his soil is man's intelligence"), Holden's line strikes a difficult balance between man and nature by recognizing at once the claims of the observer and the formidable otherness of the observed. The line also reflects her conviction that what is most remarkable (meaning both extraordinary and worth observation) about man is what he shares--with other people, with nature, and with a mutual past contained and symbolized in "this soil." Finally, the line demonstrates the impressive but characteristically understated proficiency of Holden's art, as it embodies mutuality in its vowels ("share" and "wariness," "this...