Ghost Light is a book written in the shadow of three unexpected deaths, when the poet, dazed by grief, was for a time dangerously ill himself. A stillness moves among the darkest and most searing poems Basso has ever written. The central theme is not a ghostly presence but an absence -- an impossibility -- to be endured without the crutch of superstitious belief. Punctuated by a series of unsettling still lifes, Ghost Light recreates a world in which death has made life stand still. It may well come to be regarded as the summit of Eric Basso's poetic achievement.