"Betsy Sholl's "Rough Cradle" is a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl's unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision."-Nancy EimersBetsy Sholl's masterful, musical seventh collection focuses on human dichotomies: body and soul, mystery and knowledge, grief and ecstasy. Though the self is small in relation to death, love is enormous, and no life too small or mean to matter.From "Edge of Town": "I would have""taken the whole wild western coast, wave-strewn""layers of sediment pressed down and heaved up, ""left as rubble, then smoothed by the sea's""agitated prancing in its rocky stall.""It was that rough shore I wanted. And more.""Its long view back to something older than age.""Those two huge upright stones with a stone slab""capping them left to mark the dead""as if death itself were an old implacable god, ""an ancient relentless one to stand before""dumbstruck."Poet, critic, and founding member of Alice James Books, Betsy Sholl is the author of six previous collections of poetry. Recipient of the AWP Prize for Poetry as well as a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is the current Poet Laureate of Maine and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College MFA program.