It would take much more space than I have to catalogue the range of Leader's mercurial imagination and technical virtuosity. Let me just say that in all the seemingly infinite variety of voices, there are several unifying forces at work. One is a drive to find form in the welter of observed and lived life. Under the rippling humor is a keen organizing intelligence. Leader has an almost classical impulse to symmetry.
Poems often come in pairs.
Later is a pair of poems, one for her daughter, one for her son, both about to leave home, but tenderly addressed. But within the poem the voice changes. A moment flying in wind or an eon laid down with rain Even in this poem of flinging outward, this poet's mind seeks out a symmetry. Beneath all this fertility of invention, there is a unifying ethos . It can be heard most clearly in the openly autobiographical poems at the end, but it sounds through the entire book.