Since 1956, when Adam's Footprint was published, Vassar Miller has been considered an accomplished lyric poet. Praised by such colleagues as Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, James Wright, and Larry McMurtry, her poems have appeared in nine published collections, in hundreds of periodicals, and in more than fifty anthologies, including Donald Hall's New Poets of England and America, Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry , and Chad Walsh's Today's Poets. On three separate occasions the Texas Institute of Letters has presented her its poetry award, for Adam's Footprint, Wage War on Silence (1960), and My Bones Being Wiser (1963). Leon Stokesbury, himself a Texas poet of considerable reputation, has referred to her (in Texas Books in Review, 1988) as "Texas's greatest poet," and this seems to be the general opinion throughout the state; nationally, though not so well known as in her home state, she is highly respected among connoisseurs of modern poetry.

Vassar Miller...