Meditative as they are, with a syntax lapping at itself, the phrase terse but musical, the lines borrowing and extending a talismanic lexicon, with a quieter, parenthetical voice modifying the quiet, insistent voice, with meanings catching in the inflection of the silence, Rachel Tzvia Back's poems are psalms on a journey. While Milton's Satan finds in the lowest deep a lower deep, Back finds in shrouds of white silence and space that god follows. Rereading Azimuth, I felt (again!) the hair on the back of my neck rising.