Views of the Hudson contains a sequence of poems – ‘psalms’, according to the book’s subtitle, which plays on the idea of the Promised Land – numbered one to sixty. Gardner composed these during a visit to New York. In the poems, she walks through crowds of commuters, contemplat­ing ‘the regularised grammar of the streets’ and ‘[her] own grimed reflec­tion / ... in each storefront window’.

The sterility of the human world (and of New York) is a theme that Gardner juxtaposes with her own emotional experience. A second, intertwined theme is the detach­ment and coldness of individuals. For example, in the twenty-ninth poem, she writes, ‘Some buildings tower over our lives / become our architecture of existence’. In the fourth poem, she says of the city’s inhabitants, ‘Passers-by avoid eye contact / or each other or themselves’.

Ironically, the city so engulfs the poet that the Hudson River of the book’s title is almost absent: it ap­pears once in the twenty-third poem, then a few more times towards the end. Some of the later poems are the most beautiful. That said, Gardner articulates her feelings toward New York best in the thirty-seventh poem, where she writes: ‘my heart is ... / ... a bird on a chain / looking down on the city // I cannot fly – hold me.’