A Voice in the Mountain is Peter Davison's sixth book of poetry. His last collection, Walking the Boundaries: Poems 1957–1974, established him as one of America's finest contemporary poets, one whose sharpness of vision and candor left the reader breathless…. Davison offered his world in a language chill as mountain water. He wrote with intensity about his struggle for identity, with all of its attendant complications…. With an eerie detachment, he traced the lineaments of himself and catalogued his passions. He faced directly the Medusa, memory, refusing, like Perseus, to deflect his vision with a mirroring shield…. Davison remembered his life selectively, as a poet must, plotting the co-ordinates of self, family, landscape, and society. Writing in a voice characterized by its civil tone, he proved himself capable of giving what Thoreau asked of everyone: a true account of himself.

One poem coming toward the end of Walking the...