These qualities reappear in Estuary, where Barbary returns to the theme of family with a renewed determination to come to terms with her hard-scrabble  Appalachian youth. Her repertoire of characters includes aunts, uncles, and grandparents. A world and its people come to life in this book. There are the wives of miners who know, each day, that their husbands may not come home, and there is her family’s two-hundred mile walk toward the rust belt in search of work. We also read of the search for a sadly missing son, and we see a suddenly lost brother in the morgue. These poems, in turns gritty, sexual, and rebellious, are the echoes of a way of life at once hard and proud.

With Estuary, Barbary Chaapel is at the height of her powers, deserving to be thought of with the likes of Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, James Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks, our great poets of democracy and the American people. She  is also the author of Journey of the Snow Goose, a log of her sailing years.