Miss Sarton handles [the theme of A Reckoning] gracefully, absorbing the reader in [the turmoil of Laura, the protagonist] without depressing him. She touches on the indignities of dying, the cruelty of hospitals, the spirit trapped inside the body's broken shell, the fact that only the living can be healed by love—the dying must separate themselves from love. In A Reckoning, Laura is forced into these realizations; Miss Sarton already has come to terms with death's immediacy, as she reveals in her recently published Selected Poems. "Departure is the constant at this stage;/And all we know is that we cannot stop." But she does not dwell on death. Her poetry flows with the emotion of daily routines—smooth and calm, reassuring in its lack of extremes. Tableaux of life come alive in her poems; she records events and scenes with a painter's eye. She draws her...