What I like about this book is it's poetry lite. You get all the thoughtfulness, emotional power, and imagery of poetry without those pesky line breaks. These are letters one poet, Hayden Carruth, wrote to another poet, Jane Kenyon, as she was dying of breast cancer. Probably, it's more politic to say, as she was fighting breast cancer, but the letters are suffused with a sense of urgency, a sense that what must be said must be said now before it is too late. Not that the letters spend much time on weighty matters. Carruth tells about the weather, what the cats are up to, how well he did or did not sleep the night before. It's all quite ordinary, but it is written by someone unafraid to be lyrical. Whenever I write a "poetic" letter to my friend N., she teases me about it. It's probably true that my attempts are pretentious and certainly out of the purview of our friendship. I'm fascinated by and a little jealous of the beauty in these letters.