Point of View

The poems collected in Dearly are written from a variety of points of view. While many of the pieces are driven by a first person speaker's voice, others employ the second person, while still others combine the two, or omit the speaker's identity altogether. Those pieces guided by a first person voice establish an intimate connection between the speaker and the reader. The vulnerability of the first person voice invites the reader into intimate observation, confession, worry, or prophetic musing. In the first person poems, the speaker is either describing her aging physicality, her longing for youth, or her despair with the destruction of nature. She does not conceal these concerns from her reader, owning her fears and sorrows in her own voice, and using first person pronouns. In "Salt," for example, the first person speaker admits that it is difficult to recall a better...