If you get you're hands on this one, as I did as a 13 year old at a thrift store for 10 cents, you'll never let go. Now 20 years later, the entries by these women mean many different things to me. I didn't understand Anais Nin, I do now. I understood Anne Frank, or I thought I did. Then there were all these other wonderfully written pieces by who, I didn't know....Sand, Dostoevsky, Carr, Wordsworth, Sand. I still draw off these women and their love, work, and power as the book is broken into those three parts. I still believe in the next twenty years I'll find something new, and the twenty years after that. I believe my 10 cents went a long way, and whatever monetary value it is worth to you, this is their words for us to keep forever.

I highly recommend Moffat and Painter's selection of diary and journal entries by a wide variety of women. They organize the excerpts according to themes related to love, work, and power. Well-known diarists one would expect to be here are, such as Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, and Anaïs Nin. But some of the most striking are by women that are not well known, at least in America. Hannah Senesh, who did spying work for the early state of Israel; Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Brazilian who grew up in abject poverty; Martha Martin, who survived the ordeal of being stranded in Alaska and having to give birth by herself--these are a few of the extraordinary women in this book. Reading it is like sitting down with strangers who quickly end up friends--and since so many of them are writing because no one around them could listen, they pour out everything in their hearts and minds. The coeditors have a knack for selecting just the right sequence of entries, making the book more than the sum of its parts. Finally, Painter's afterward, titled "Psychic Bisexuality," caps the book with a thoughtful consideration of the significance of diary writing. Anyone who can appreciate self-expressive writing will profit by reading this book. Vintage is to be thanked for keeping it in print for so long.

This is an excellent collection of literary selections about grieving. I was given this book and one other (Dying: A Book of Comfort, ed. Pat McNees) when my mother died. I couldn't read anything very long -- couldn't concentrate -- so it was helpful to have these books with short passages on what I was going through.

Wide-ranging, well-chosen short works (mostly poems, some chapters and essays) on death and grieving. I particularly liked how it was divided into "seasons" of grieving, so I could pick a section depending on how I was feeling in my bereavement that particular day (e.g., "Winter" is divided into Shock, Idealization and Anger, Sing Sorrow, Consolations, etc; "Summer/Fall" have Memory, Dreaming the Dead, Grief's Wisdom, etc). There are individual sections on Mourning the Loss of a Child and The Grief of Children.

I have had my own losses and grief work in the past, and now work with the dying. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to families and friends. This is the one to go to to get some solace, find something for the eulogy, have a poem for the memorial service, or just find a like mind months and years after the loss. This is it.

This wonderful anthology is for anyone who loves poetry, but can be a miracle for those who both love poems and who find themselves in grief. It is so simply and intelligently organized, into sections that approximate stages following the loss of one who is loved, with selections of poetry ranging from classic Chinese poets Mei Sheng and Fu I, whose first century B.C. verse hit my sensibilities as strongly as Anne Sexton's, to the incredible unvarnished strength of several Edna St. Vincent Millay poems, that forced me to see that poet in a different light. Each section can be read as its own anthology.

I salute Mary Jane Moffat for this wonderful volume and commend it to everyone. It grew from the author's personal loss, and its careful selections and great strength reflect this. For me, facing the greatest loss I could ever imagine, it was a great gift, the only writing that matterred to me for months. The volume closes with the wonderful "Dear Men and Women" of John Hall Wheelock. Please read it all!