The poems in Slow Fire use original and compelling language to create experiences so real that the reader can inhabit them. This poet can delight in a “loitering” saxophone or a twelfth-century stone prayer hut, but much of her attention—her “eye” of close observation and precise language—is tuned to the natural world. With a lifelong interest in ecology and outdoor experience from Maine to Arizona, Pamela Alexander incorporates specifics of desert and forest into her lines. Whatever the subject of the poem, from the death of a mother to marriage to real estate (James Merrill called her choice of subjects “impeccably democratic”), this is a book with an environmental consciousness and a liveliness of language that engages the reader on many levels.