Carolyn Kizer [in The Ungrateful Garden] is least serious, truly serious, when she is making head-on attempts at seriousness. In lighter mood her verse soars with unlikely grace from chamber-pot to sainthood. There are some remarkably good things in this strong-tasting collection, thick with catastrophes and fortitude, bursting with bloody but unbowed puns and light-hearted quotes or misquotes. Literature and life dance such a riotous pas de deux that you can't tell the one from the other and neither can they….