Kinds of Affection comes to us as a confirmation and an extension of Josephine Miles's best work. In this … book we again confront a poetry that is confident and skilled enough to consider no field of knowledge hostile to poetry and no poetic type sacredly or safely defined. The poems are at ease in a world that increasingly has had to acknowledge the sciences and social sciences as bedfellows of the humanities. As the poems hover between parable and conceit, and lyric and dialogue, they indicate how easy they can be with the shifting faces which the world may put on.

The poems in this … volume reveal the same scrutinizing delineation of Miss Miles's earlier verse. Such delineation, frequently taking the form of linguistic or metaphysical play(fulness), moves toward a poetry of vision in which seeing is made to accommodate things strange and even unpleasant. And the...