Silence Fell

Dickinson's life story could win somebody an Oscar; rendered profoundly deaf at the age of six, the Englishwoman nevertheless attended Oxford, then became a composer and a music teacher before moving to the remote village of Alston, in England's Northeast. There she fell in love with Douglas Dickinson, an elderly sheep farmer; the couple led a delighted rural life together for years before Douglas' death in 2004. Selected from two UK volumes (2001's Scarberry Hill and 2004's The Voice), these gentle verses of love and rural life describe the happy couple, their alternately green and wintry surroundings, and the work of gardening, keeping house and raising lambs, wethers and ewes. Poems about Douglas-some in rhyming forms-can be unguardedly tender: ""When we step round the house/ to the front door again and kiss,/ we know it is no ordinary/ love, this."" Her poems on his death would melt even an adamant heart. The volume's arrangement follows the rural year, from March to February, through planting and harvest, the lambing and slaughtering seasons, and moving records of particular scenes: ""The windsock pulls/ to east. It might yet rain. The moment stays."" Only a few poems-notably the two-page tour de force ""I Thought You'd Gone to the River,"" reminiscent of Edward Thomas-achieve individual, memorable forms, but the whole collection resounds with genuine emotion, and could be a sleeper hit. Galway Kinnell's inspiring foreword describes how the American poet met the Englishwoman, and praises the simplicities Kinnell sees in her work.