Sophie Cabot Black is an unabashedly passionate poet. Her language is exquisite, each word falling perfectly into precise structures of vision. Whether in a loose sonnet form or in a taut longer line, these poems are exercises in the extension of the soul. Devotional and pure, Sophie Cabot Black's voice is one of inconstant waiting, of meditation on edge. *The Misunderstanding of Nature* encompasses two New Worlds: the contemporary one and the one of seventeenth-century New England. At its epiphany, this collection presents a long poem called "The Arguments," a monologue in the voice of Dorothy Bradford, one of the first Englishwomen to have set foot in America. Through her complicated search for transcendence, we overhear the movements of learning to belong, caught at the rim of the wilderness.