The Etymology of Spruce

...Joyce Wilson writes about the self and others without reflexive ironies. Her project, common to much of our poetry, resists the pull of universal angst and particularizes experience (or the fiction of experience) into syntactically and sensuously pleasing gestures. In Provisions, Wilson invokes the life-changing journey-metaphor in homey terms ... Such writing invokes time-honored pleasures of poetry: the lilt of sound on the tongue and in the ear, the summoning of past experience, the recovery of sounds and odors. Proust as much as Stevens or Eliot lurks behind these modern and postmodern forms of nostalgia, and without his example of sensuous grace much contemporary poetry would collapse into unmediated sentiment. William Doreski, Harvard Review