Poems that explore how that girl became this woman, how the experiences of the child shaped the preoccupations, the eyes, the head and the heart, of the adult. Poems that explore the whole mysterious cycle, with stops for grief and beauty along the way; that prepare the poet for the sweet hold of earth, each life a seed in the dark. Christopher Bursk, winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for The Improbable Swervings of Atoms, writes of This Woman "I found myself delighting in poem after poem--and in the way the poems spoke to each other. I know no one better able to renew in even the most jaded of us a sense of wonder and an appreciation of the fragile balance of our lives. Elizabeth Raby faces the terrible and yet she keeps returning to a brave and determined affirmation of the now."