Rhina P. Espaillat occupies an unusual position in the movement generally designated as New Formalism. Like that of other, better-known formalists--such as Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, X. J. Kennedy, and Donald Justice--Espaillat began her publishing career in the 1940s well before the New Formalist movement began. Her early work, though achieving considerable success in periodicals and occasionally gaining recognition for prize-winning individual poems, did not figure as a presence in American poetry until her first collection appeared in 1992. Her more or less continuous formalist career does refute the common misconception that free verse and other nonmetrical forms so dominated the period from roughly 1960 to 1990 that the only major work in meter and/or rhyme was being written by a handful of better-known "academic" poets. In this sense, she worked on, not alone, but quietly, while such academic or formalist verse as did manage to appear showed...