In "Messenger Ellen", Bryant Voigt arranges selections from six previous volumes to culminate in transcendent recent poems. From the early short lyrics to the compelling narratives to the masterful long sequences, Voigt addresses with increasing power her recurring subject - the human soul embattled by 'the forces of plenty' and loss. A farmer in Virginia, the imagined survivors of the 1918 influenza epidemic, the indifferent or cruel or generous natural world, or the poet herself, clear-eyed-all are made indelible through her art. This triumph is expressed in the group of new poems, where a lifetime of discipline and wisdom contends with the crises that brought the poems into being. The struggle results in some of the most extraordinary work of Voigt's career.