The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs

The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs might at first seem an odd title for a book-length sequence that chronicles the poet's widowed mother's steady and irreversible descent into forgetting. But this is also, in equal measure, an act of remembering, remembering not the woman "blunted" by Alzheimer's, but the strong-willed and incandescent personality who was the beating heart of her family's life. In poems that are plainspoken, clear-eyed, and mercifully free of sentimentality and special pleading,