Cloudless at First presents 30 years of Morely"s poetry, including her most recent work,in the same sure, lyrical voice. Hilda Morley"s poems, even the elegiac ones, are a celebration, almost ritually so, steeped in the wine of what Donne called "the ecstasy." She is a poet of loss, and she is a romantic as much as she is a metaphysician. The years have not diminished her amazingly youthful ardor. The late poems come to us wild and fresh, radiating a joy of invention that is inseparable from her word-play. -Stanley Kunitz