The Wild Braid, Stanley Kunitz, 2005

A beautiful, elegiac weaving of a poet’s personal history, his reflections on poetry (expression of the unconscious, the secret vaults of the self) and gardening (compositional entity to convey the weight and force of the poem’s motion. “Art conceals and reveals at the same time. Part of the concept of the garden is that you never see it all at once.” Fusion) and especially on aging. His love of individual plants (an old Alberta spruce, a juniper he has pruned) and species (like me, her favorites are the Dawn Redwood and Japanese anemones). The weaving of the musing, the personal life details, the garden descriptions and photos, and the poems is beautifully done.