Cinder: New and Selected Poems

to the Nth, like the truth of an ending unskeined across the crust of the white field.

Though it happened only once, I

am sending the thought of the thought continuing.

To return to the field before the mowing.

When a goldfinch swayed on a blue stem stalk,

and the wind and the sun stirred the hay.

—from “After the Mowing”

Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, in...