One of Josephine Miles's earlier poems is called "On Inhabiting an Orange." This poem, as much as any other in Miss Miles's early work, establishes a way of looking at the world that has made the total work possible up to the present. The world. Reality is too big to see all at once. But successive views of Reality are possible through the perusal and contemplation of segments or aspects or steps, and the poem can find a form within philosophic Reality without letting go of the tangible world at all. (p. 21)

[Miles's poems are] crisp and kind, modest but sometimes gnomic, and always content to know reality on a human scale. There is nothing superhuman in the poems. They are the words of a survivor. The superhuman goes down; the human seems to continue.

Josephine Miles's particular segment of the globe is America and, more particularly, parts...