A Company of Angels

Florence McNeil has long been admired for the depth of compassion in her poetry, writing poems of clarity and lucidity, through several previous books of poetry and a well-received adult novel, Breathing Each Others Air. In this new book, A Company of Angels she transforms the delicate details of a tentative and personal grief into a universal statement of feeling. She presents a dual sequence of poems, both heralding a company of angels, evoking the enigma of the angelic within. In the first company of angels, through processing grief and the past, a private experience of grief is examined and transcended. In the second half, the poet be-comes more detached, and moves to the biographical, with a look at Lewis Carolls relationship with Alice Liddel. Florence McNeils poetry has always been concerned with precision detail and clarity of expression, and in A Company of Angels, she extends the range of her lyrical voice.