A work of powerful clarity and deceptive simplicity, The Ghost Trio carries Bierds to new levels of accomplishment. It is a book that demands to be read and read again, each new reading adding greater depth and dimension. Taken individually, each of these poems is extraordinary; taken together, their cumulative force astounds.

Linda Bierds's true subject, here as in all her work, is imagination and immortality: the striving to know and to make, the yearning to leave an imprint on the mind and in the memory, in the soul and in the soil. And indeed, soil - which both gives and receives life - becomes here a metaphor for the creative force as it links each poem to the others.

Structurally, The Ghost Trio winds forward in time through its three sections, then doubles back to recover the journey and experience it once again. Phrases and images planted early recur, striking chords of memory, while figures from history mingle with the seemingly autobiographical "I" and, like the poems, call to each other in an echoing song that is itself a ghost image.

And in truth this is a work that reverberates with ghosts. But they are the ghosts of our shared consciousness, not those of our childhood terrors. They sing to us of our civilization: our common history, our dreams and demiurges.