Josephine Miles's new and selected poems ["To All Appearances"] show a quirky commenting mind still finding things of interest in the American scene, reliving in verse the Berkeley riots…. There is a need for more poems of this sort, poems, so to speak, of the day's news, now largely a preserve of interested propagandists. But Miles can also be metaphysical, as in her fine poem on teaching, "Paths," about "going out into the fields of learning":

             Ant labors, hopper leaps away;
                    too early for the bee,
             The spider's silk hypotheses
                          unfold
             Tenacious, tenable.

"The spider's silk hypotheses" is worthy of Emily Dickinson, whose voice, in its dryer tone, has entered Miles's voice as well; but Miles is more humane than Dickinson in her parables, of which my favorite is about the drowning man (in a poem called "Family") who hollers "help," caught in the undertow, while his unconscious...