content: "The dead can tell us, being dead, what no living personcan tell us," wrote T.S. Eliot. What Masters has done for us(when he was alive) is write a collection of whispered epitaphs,voices silently crying out from the graves the ironies, sadnesses, wastes, agonies, and miscalculations of their spent lives.This is not poetry to turn a phrase, necessarily. Nor is it poetry to enchant. Instead, it is Wisdom Poetry. Poetry that carries the weight of mistakes of the twisted lives, creating their own kind of hell (Hobbes: "Hell is truth too late learned").Written in 1915 and written as if for choral voices--wouldn't this be a great piece for a dramatic interpretation in which several voices perform each poem? Collected, it becomes overwhelming, just as a visit to a cemetary to mourn the losses of one of your loves can also be overwhelming.No, it is not sad, though. Somehow, hope still survives, like the shoot stabbing through the cracked granite toward the sun.