Phone calls from the Dead: A deep listening to voices other than her own poetic voice, pervades Beth Bentley’s first volume of poetry. Not only are her phone calls from the dead, but from the living as well. The Poet tries to hear what ancestors, family, friends and the silent voices of primitive nature are saying to her. The theme of the continuity of generations and experiences recurs persistently. Generations love and betray each other. The dead keep their hands on the pulse of the living, stalking them at their desks, lurking behind shrubbery, moving about in the wings trying to direct every simply action, complicating each response. Phone Calls From the Dead is also about the loss of innocence as it recurs, a motif over and over throughout our lives. But the loss of innocence is balanced by the search for something solid, some truth; the need for roots. For this poet, innocence renews itself, enabling her to continue in the face of uneasy changes, suicides, madness, betrayals, the violent life of the times. All Miss Bentley’s poems show her competence with words, her sense of structure and her eye for the people, situations and actions that poems are made of.