Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems. She helped create her own gardens in Sissinghurst, Kent, which provide the backdrop to Sissinghurst Castle. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf. Poems of West and East is a short collection of her early work, which was published in 1917. (Summary by Wikipedia and Elizabeth Klett)

This collection’s title is taken from its first story, a novella, which is followed by four shorter tales, all expertly and sensitively drawn. Story 1, “The Heir,” concerns an inheritance as told from the point of view of the heir, an unmarried middle-aged man. Its subtitle, “A Love Story,” is not a reference to another person but to the inheritance. Story 2, “The Christmas Party,” tells of a longtime family alienation and separation followed by a shocking reunion. Story 3, “Patience,” is a touching tale of an apparently “comfortable” marriage, but where the husband tends to lapse into his secret memories of a long-past love...