So Green Our Beginnings is a compendium of poems and essays I wrote between 1955 and the present - over sixty years - dating back to that year when I began to write for the first time as a young wife, recovering from 8 1/2 war years spent in Shanghai, China, where I had not yet a thought, or a feeling, of what it meant to be normal. I tried to grasp "normal" by peeking over imaginary fences and to see what "over there" might be, whether normal might...