A Gatherer, of Days and Lights and Secret Places is a new collection of poetry and accompanying abstract pastel art by Ethel Mortenson Davis. It contains 56 new poems and 12 art reproductions. In all of Davis's books images in the poems are intense, the language describing them so condensed and essential that each shines like a diamond. The contents of the poems intermingle the earth's beauty with comments, sometimes caustic, about the human experience. As one critic noted, she "is a clear-eyed visionary who observes the world around her and reveals to us what she sees in powerful poems . . . that are nothing short of mystical." If the poems are "spare in structure and economical in language, " as another critic said. Her pastels "are a vibrant swirl of color and shape that engulf the senses with a richness that seems sinful." Together, the poems and the pastels "accentuate each other in ways that inspire new meanings and feelings, shifting like the interplay of light and shadow one experiences in a long walk through a woods.