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When Barbara Kingsolver won a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Pigs in Heaven (1989) after receiving the 1991 PEN West Award for Animal Dreams (1990), her arrival as a serious writer of contemporary American fiction could hardly be questioned; what was not immediately apparent, perhaps, was the breadth of knowledge and experience in the author who brought these works to life. Kingsolver is the daughter of a physician, married a chemist and worked as a research assistant in the Department of Physiology at the University of Arizona. She received a BA (magna cum laude) in 1977 from DePauw University and an MS in 1981 from the University of Arizona and later pursued further graduate study. From 1981 to 1985, she was employed as a technical writer in arid land studies, and from 1985 to 1987, she worked as a freelance journalist before devoting herself to full-time writing in 1987. This background subtly invigorates Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven as Kingsolver adeptly coordinates the intricacies of plot lines that move across ecological, ethnobiological, and regional backdrops.

“Ode to the Most Holy Eucharist: Exposition and World,” a relatively short poem in classic hexameters, is divided into three overall sections of four-line stanzas (“Exposition,” “World,” and “The Devil”), which are thirty-six, forty, and sixteen lines long. The title indicates the serious nature of the poem, but also suggests the possibility of an ironic reading by emphasizing the superlative degree in “Most Holy.” This blending of high seriousness and ironic detachment is one of the hallmarks of the poem. When its first two sections were published in 1928, the poem carried the subtitle “Fragment” above the dedication, indicating that Federico García Lorca intended to add to the poem. The poem was completed during García Lorca’s visit to the United States in 1929.

“The Windows” is a short poem of forty lines that are divided into ten four-line stanzas of Alexandrines. The poem divides exactly into two sections; in the first half of the poem, an old man makes his way slowly toward a window of the hospital in which he is dying. The second half of the poem presents a vision of the old man’s dreams that have been occasioned by the warm sunlight filtering through the panes of glass.

“Toast” is a sonnet whose fourteen lines are broken into two groups of four lines and two groups of three lines. Stéphane Mallarmé delivered this “toast” at a banquet on February 9, 1893, to encourage his companions to drink in celebration of the magazine La Plume. The poem has a festive, optimistic tone befitting the purpose of its original composition. The poem’s French title, “Salut,” conveys the double and perhaps triple meaning that Mallarmé intended better than does the more static English translation, “Toast.” Salut is the word used to describe a speech one delivers as a prelude to drinking, but salut is often also an imperative part of that speech, in which the speaker encourages his companions to raise their glasses with this word, as one might say in English, “Cheers!” or “Bottoms Up!”