Mrs. Miniver, Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, Aunt Elsa, are now joined by Mrs. (and Mr.) Appleyard of Boston, younger than Aunt Elsa, older and mellower than Mrs. Miniver and the Cugate. Mother of grown children, who are not too respectful but casually devoted, whom she loves for their faults rather than their virtues, wife of a loyal but fierily opinionated husband, Mrs. Appleyard is impish about expected things, unexpected, and sturdily, individually Bostonian....

The poems in Crocus take as their starting points, the interior universes created by myth, art, and memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary. Finding voice through both lyric and narrative approaches, Gottshall's poems are filled with complex music, unexpected imagery, and the mysterious interplay between the physical world and that of the imagination.

Bramble the horse gets bored giving riding lessons, but regains her enthusiasm when she goes to live with a girl named Maggie.

When Radish the pony grows too big for the girls who own him, he goes to live at a horse camp where there are always new children for him to train.

Somewhere in backwoods Vermont, a young woman refuses to back down in the face of threats from a violent local villain. Her boyfriend has fled the state in fear, and local law enforcement can do nothing to protect her. And so she resolves not only to stand her ground, but also to fight back. A pair of unlikely allies - Lester, a crafty old-timer, and Nate, built like a tractor and not much smarter - join her cause, willing to do whatever it takes....

In House of Days, his fourth collection of poems, Jay Parini moves beyond his earlier work to address the environmental and spiritual crises that afflict us in the late twentieth century. The book moves from "Nature Revisited," an elegiac sequence of poems about the ontological status of nature itself, to the title sequence, "House of Days," which might be thought of as the poet's field notes as he moves through a season, month by month. "The Ruined...

Illustrations and simple text describe the various vegetables people eat, how they grow, tips on growing your own vegetables, and interesting vegetable facts.