Once a technical writer, she has always had a strain of the scientific or the technical in her work, producing complex and vibrant metaphors. Her first book, Radiation (1973), astounded critics and readers with its precision, its hard-edged exploration of nature and human nature. Poems in it rapidly found their way into anthologies and classrooms. McPherson’s work tends to veer away from the hard-edged scientific approach of other poets, like Marianne Moore, and to move into an area where science and humanity blend and touch. Often, the scientific and the human appear as double visions of the same truthreading such a work is like looking through a telescope that has two different lenses. Science is a constant presence in her books, whether it is botany, theory of black holes, archaeology, or geology; there is a bedrock of science to McPherson’s vision of the world.