[Hilary Biehl]

Originally Posted by James Midgley

Though I see the nightingale's gesture-to-the-imagination as redemption, rather than levelling it alongside the other banalities.

I agree with this. I think the last line is a gesture, but a genuinely meaningful one, albeit in tension with a reflexive/protective irony.

Another poem from the book is about a dog from a puppy mill which she couldn't quite bring herself to adopt. Towards the end of the poem, the dog becomes a metaphor for poetry ("As I drove away, her borders dissolved. / She dispersed herself across the landscape like mist.")

It ends:

"At age ten, I turned away from tenderness.
I remember the moment. A flipping of a switch.
My house is a cold mess except for that thing in the corner.
Poetry, that snarling, flaming bitch."

So poetry is the dog she has turned away from, rejected - yet it lives with her anyway and aggressively illuminates and warms her house.