Hamutal Bar-Yosef's lyrics lead into the heart's (and history's) difficult thickets: the familial pull of a vanished bourgeois home in prewar Poland (a longing suckled at the poet's aggrieved mother's breast) or the lost communitarian belonging of an early kibbutz (supplanted by a proprietary capitalist). Bar-Yosef's humane embrace of both the historical and personal makes grief one of her great subjects. The early death of a brother in war, a son dead by suicide, and family members murdered in the Shoah color her life and choices in ways that are understood only partially and after-the-fact. Familial love and estrangement appear retrospectivelyas one ("What It Was About") or prospectively apart ("My Name Goes Before Me") and invariably layered and complex ("What I'll Say to My Mother," "The Cute Little Baby"). Poems celebrate a woman's desire and pleasure, registering them most sharply when lost ("Ode to Love," "Quite Suddenly"). Poems about the losses and anxieties of old age form a sequence unlike any other to be found in contemporary poetry: bracing, honest, and useful. Hearing the voice that "says no more / than necessary to the blind man" as he gets on and off a bus, allowing him dignity and control, is akin to reaching the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Filling Station": "Somebody loves us all." Like Constantine Cavafy and Wislawa Szymborska, she allows a glimpse of holy solidarity, of a time, perhaps some 500 years in the future, where there will be no need for steel doors and bomb shelters.