The appearance of Rachel Hadas's Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems in 1998 allowed readers to survey the development of a skilled and imaginative poet in midcareer. From the beginning, Hadas's poems have been marked by intelligence, acute perception, attention to craft and form, and a constant sense of the ability of time to both illuminate and transform the past. Birth, family, friendship, death, and the power of language itself have been among her recurring themes, with individual volumes tracing varied subjects such as her son's childhood years and her work leading an AIDS poetry workshop. But Hadas's major theme is memory, how the past continues to re-present itself, both raising and answering questions about how humans define themselves through their lived and imagined experiences. Although she has never aligned herself with any particular poetry movement in either prose or interviews, she has most often been associated...