he and his music are a major theme of her work. The influence on the open construction of the poetry of Hilda Morley was not Charles Olson, but Wong May. Wong May was a young poet originally from China via Singapore. Wong May met Hilda Morley at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during a residency there in 1969. She persuaded Morley to change her poetry using spacing and breaks for expressive effect. Morley revised her earlier poetry as well, using open construction. Morley wrote, “The poem of organic form molds its phrasing and spacing to conform to the pressures of the poetic content.” It was not until 1976 (at the age of 60) that her first collection, A Blessing Outside Us, was published through the efforts of Denise Levertov. Levertov and Morley became friends in the late 1950s, and they had an extensive correspondence. Morley greatly respected Levertov as a poet, and valued her advice. Levertov wrote on Morley, “The lucid, the illuminated quality of poem after poem is given them by the precision of their structure…the sum of the parts is, as in all the open ‘secrets’ of nature and of art, beyond accounting: the duende is dark within transparence.” Morley had five volumes of poetry published within her lifetime, and another after her death. Her poetry is involved with life and living, as well as a powerful collection dealing with the death and mourning of Wolpe, "What Are Winds and What Are Waters". Morley's work has been compared to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and it has won critical praise and numerous prizes. Part of the force of Morley’s work is a boldness to go as far as she can within her medium. In her hands it is always an expressive personal means. In writing on Morley’s long poem “The Shutter Clangs” Stanley Kunitz comments, “In the poem from which the passage is taken she meditates on John Donne’s ‘Goodfriday, Riding Westward' and mounts on that meditation an oceanic spate of images pertaining to the death of her beloved – a montage with a span of three centuries, so rich and eloquent, even in its extravagance, that it constitutes a daring tour de force. It is a vehicle that threatens on almost every page to fall apart, but in the end, out of the ‘clair bones’ and the dark years, the imagination seems to spread its