This book further extends the range of Cynthia Macdonald's ambition and achievement. From the beginning her poems have read like letters from the unconscious, full of wit, drama, invention, and intelligence. In the last decade, without sacrificing those pleasures, her work has deepened, becoming more passionate, more lyrical; the language, as Edmund White described it, "silvery, transparent, harmonious." All these qualities remain, but to them has been added a kind of wisdom about where we are, where we have been, and where we may be going. She asks questions more often than she gives answers, testifying that "what is clear is never really clear." Yet the reader closes the book bathed "in the clarifying light that glances off the winter road," and in the feeling of desire of "Vermeer's Lady Reading at an Open Window." Praising Cynthia Macdonald's poems, Carol Muske once noted that they "alter everything we take for granted in poetry," and, in another review, Liz Rosenberg remarked on the poems' "gorgeous, almost baroque quality. Her work continues to surprise and please--and disturb."

		Chosen as one of The New York Times Book Review's Notable Poetry Books of the Year for 1991, Living Wills is at once an arresting collection of Cynthia Macdonald's new poems and a substantial selection from her four earlier books. "She is one of the strongest, most interesting poets now writing precisely because she understands that ours is a moment of radical doubt. And she has fashioned a highly original, exuberant poetry...Since the publication of her first book in 1972, Macdonald's work has probed contemporary darkness with elegant word play, broad puns, wide-ranging allusions, dreamlike stories, and eerie fables...If some contemporary poems seem like short stories cut to their essence, several of Macdonald's read like distilled novels...Throughout the book, but particularly in the newest poems, the poet works toward the terrible knowledge of acts and consequences." Robert Schultz, The Hudson Review "Living Wills indicates not only what this poet has done over the past twenty years but new directions and powers...Ms. Macdonald's work has always had a gorgeous, almost baroque quality...The newest poems here, under the title 'The Precise Shape of a Wave ,' constitute two-thirds of a full-length book of poems, and they are the best in the collection. 'Separations' is a remarkable poem about familial love and loss, 'At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners' is a tour de force, and 'Rose Magpie and Magpie Rose' reveals the poet's new, brighter, richer, more varied palette." Liz Rosenberg, The New York Times Book Review