Inheritance

Inheritance, Margaret Kaufman's second full-length collection of poems, takes in the broad scope of a life and its inflections across generations. A child's first diffident steps match a parent's last ones; childhood companions come to stand beside the poet in cemeteries and waiting rooms; a son's miraculous delivery from death echoes the spiriting of a Greek warrior from the battlefield. Lyrical, yet plainspoken and unpretentious, Kaufman's poems often leap across memories and metaphors mid-sentence in ways that defy logic, but the deep resonances of rhythm, image, and internal rhyme always find their way home in the reader's imagination.