Here and Elsewhere: Collected Poems

Sandra McGarry writes poetry, she tells us at the outset, because buttons have holes and so does history. Here and Elsewhere is a collection built from those small, durable objects-a grandmother's button box, a dented fruitcake tin, a whistling kettle, a screen door, a shoebox of someone else's photographs found at a garage sale-and from what they hold: a childhood interrupted when both parents died within 22 months of each other, a fourth-grade classroom, a marriage, the long life that followed.The poems are quilt blocks, each one a square of a particular day, arranged so that the years show through. They begin in the East, by the ocean, and end in the mountains of northern Colorado, where geese rise off a pond at first light and the world, as one poem admits, is fracturing in places the poet can't even name. What holds against that fracturing is attention: to a lemon, to a puddle, to the way a name said aloud brings a whole house back.With a cover photograph by Pat Slentz, this is a collection from a poet who has spent a lifetime looking closely.