The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.