One of the most useful things poets can do for their art is to invent a speaker who creates in his or her or its point-of-view feelings, flesh, and world—the symbolic values of the poem…. Such poetry tends to be uncommonly strong and illuminating, and we have some fine examples of it in … One Who Became Lost, by Marilyn Bowering.

With the exception of a few excellent poems … ("Café" and "The Monastery of Hosios Louikas"), the best poems in [this book] … are not spoken by a poetic speaker who represents either the average human sensibility or even the average poetic speaker. Instead the speaker is woman-in-nature—a primitive, an animal, a witch, a goddess—some sort of natural, female force. Bowering [has] … an interest in recreating a point-of-view vitally female at the level of dream, totem, and myth. [She is] … rewriting the fairy tales, creating a world...