Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, a multidisciplinary writer who has published sixteen books, including non-fiction works in political science, psychology, spirituality, grief, illness, human rights, also writes fine contemporary poetry. Her sixth and newest full-length collection, The Unpredictability of Light, touches on all her non-fiction subjects, especially the political. Let me confess right now that “I, too, dislike it, political poetry, that is,” to deliberately misquote Miss Moore. Usually, I find it didactic and shrill, smacking of over-earnestness and propaganda. But what makes Bouvard’s work worth reading and re-reading is that she uses her lyric gifts to make the political into poetry, not diatribe. She also uses these gifts to address issues of ecology and the planet, her place in her human family and in the family of man, the crucible of illness, and our temporal place in history, both personal and public. In doing so, she creates new fusions: the political-lyric, the eco-lyric, the social-lyric, and the spiritual-lyric, and she does it in a way that’s both original and memorable. Bouvard knows “the delicacy of where to stop short.” (Frost), with a language free of cant and rant; her goal is always poetry, not polemic. —Barbara Crooker