Like so many others, I was for years familiar only with a handful of H. D.'s early poems, "Peartree," "Orchard," "Heat," "Oread." Beautiful though they were, they did not lead me to look further, at the time. Perhaps it was that being such absolutes of their kind they seemed final, the end of some road not mine; and I was looking for doors, ways in, tunnels through.

When I came, late, to her later work, not searching but by inevitable chance, what I found was precisely doors, ways in, tunnels through. One of these later poems, "The Moon in Your Hands," says:

       If you take the moon in your hands
       and turn it round
       (heavy slightly tarnished platter)
       you're there;

This was to find not a finality but a beginning. The poem ends with that sense of beginning…. In "Sagesse" the photograph of an owl—a White...