Like Memory, Caverns

Book excerpt: Like Memory, Caverns is an elegiac book, mourning losses from the personal to the planetary. Though personal in tone, these graceful, meditative poems reach insistently outward to the natural and social worlds, moving beyond today's confessionalism. In fact, the self keeps disappearing, as the world as it is seen seems to replace the seer. This poetry explores the tenuousness of each individual moment while affirming a necessary--if difficult--existence of the free spirit. Elizabeth Dodd writes a remarkably musical free verse, with her eye kept focused on the tangible significant detail of natural imagery.