The majority of poems in ["Death Mother and Other Poems"] center on the "primal recognition," the Lear experience, the death consciousness that must eventually come to all of us, but Morgan distances himself from morbidity by carefully considering how to live life with this awareness. The long title poem, "Death Mother," begins with the speaker's conversational acknowledgment to the ultimate femme fatale that whether she appears as sleep, night, or dreams, she does indeed have dominion. The poem moves mostly in free verse through bits of narration, conversation, and generalized comment, in an intellectual wrestling match with the Angel of Death. The odds of the match are overwhelming but the necessity of it is obvious, for "not to recognize her is/not to recognize ourselves." Speaker shifts from conversationalist to Nazi corpse-burier, to almost omniscient seer, to Death herself. Death is at once Earth-Mother, lover, destroyer, guide, religious...