Keeping Order on My Shelf: Poems and Translations

Alert and modest, generous and perspicacious, Daniel Webster's poems invite us into the various worlds his questing curiosity opens up: worlds not only of other languages and cultures but of the entire world outside the self. What I am tempted (if not qualified) to call Webster's excellent translations-graceful, deft, poignant-from Russian and German stand out in this collection, as do the riddles, but KEEPING ORDER ON MY SHELF as a whole is, with its winning clarity, worth a place on many shelves.-Rachel Hadas