What's It Like To Be Old? offers an anatomy of aging, beginning with the question, what is it like to be old. Individual poems explore a panoply of senior persons and psychologies. Succeeding poems then consider the ways in which older people experience the achievements or failures of aging life. The limits nature places on aging is the subject of the next poems. Ending in a section titled Ripeness, the sequence explores the pains and consolations of accepting old age and death. In this broad consideration of the topic of old age, successive poems use a variety of poetic types and voices, from monologues, satires and comic poems, to meditations, prayers, and myth. Poems laugh or cry over the normal human experience of aging and death; many focus on the joys and pains of waiting.
