The CalfbearerPaperback, 5 August 1999

Ida Affleck Graves was first published as Ida Graves by Leonard Woolf and the Hogarth Press; later (post-war) novels came from Faber. Then a long silence, during which she continued to write, only to stuff her poems into a drawer. This hiatus was finally broken by OUP's book of poems, A Kind
Husband, published in 1994.
The Calfbearer consists of nearly all new poems, written in the past few years, that reveal a poet as vigorous and moving as ever. Her poems are emphatic and observant, on subjects such as her childhood, animals, and a few that look bravely on death, as Graves prepares to enter her ninety-seventh
year.