The most prominent historical figure in these Civilian Histories is Mary Rowlandson, whose story of Indian captivity -- coupled with the pleasures of food -- inaugurates the American obsession with the boundaries between domestic intimacy and public knowledge. While the terrain of intimate behavior her is often familiar, its texture is not; a dissociation infiltrates all of Upton's rituals, to the point where the book begins in the midst of disappointment: "And eves not lulled as I wanted them to be". (Upton is the author of The Muse of Abandonment, a study of Russell Edson, Louise Gluck, James Tate, Jean Valentine and Charles Wright.) In "Garden Solstice", for instance, "In the glint of needle light, /of grass seeds, dew flecks, /a friend is throwing her voice/while far inside our grainy heaven/a butcher's apron/ripples its dried blood in the wind". The book is in fact stuffed with food and flavor: oysters, sugar, berries, eggs, basil, spearmint. But far from offering up a neo-magical-realist feast, Upton,,whose No Mercy (1989) was chosen for the National Poetry Series, uses oral imagery to enrich the odd appetizers of language she serves with cautious passion: "Sins get weepier, phlegmier, looser./ He's the trunk of the family tree// and each topmost branch, / each living shade above him/ bears its fruits". The 70-odd page-length lyrics and five slightly longer serial poems in this seventh collection branch out with a heat of intimacy that is sensual, remarkable and pointed.