How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? "The Bower" engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker's year in Belfast, Ireland, with her young daughter...

This World and That One Sometimes you defy it, I am not that, watching a stranger cry like a dog when she thinks she's alone at the kitchen window, hands forgotten under the running tap. The curtains blow out, flap the other side of the sill. In you...