Always the peculiar spell of Diana O'Hehir's way of using language has made her poetry exceptional, and exceptionally interesting. She has an irresistable inclination for the unexpected, doubtless because O'Hehir's imagination has a will of its own. It has a quality which brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is wild, and it is magical, but it derives from actual life and authentic emotions and ideas. The reader enters a real garden, although some of the details, creatures and scenes in it are imagined. The unique quality of this imagination seems to originate in listening, listening to a voice that is not the same as the voice we find in her fiction. It seems, in fact, "summoned." In Spells For Not Dying Again this ever-present wildness is doubled by O'Hehir's use of the Egyptian Book Of The Dead. Although the poems begin with the problems O'Hehir encountered in dealing with the death of her ex-husband, years after a troubled marriage and divorce, the poems also deal with other deaths, including the expectation of her own.