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In an essay on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Blythe takes landscapes a step further: Tolstoy's merciless story about a man's terminal illness becomes the occasion for a consideration of the human body as geography. How does the territory of the ailing become a no man's land to the healthy? What detours will the living not invent to avoid contact with the near dead? In the end, says Blythe, every man, like Ivan, becomes his own isolated and besieged domain of flesh and blood. Dust to dust is the final, inevitable summary of mortals. Yet every life-oozing ounce of clay tells the lover of vistas that existence is something more than a matter of life and death. The search for meaning, says Blythe in this moving collection, continues in two landscapes: the one that holds the body, and the body that contains the soul.
— By Melvin Maddocks