The poems in The Keep are influenced by art, by paintings, by ""thinking about abstraction and figuration and the space between, beauty apprehended and lost, the divine apprehended and lost."" Emily Wilson's poems are also saturated with nature; from ""the great oaks emptying, russet, gusseted"" to ""the caribou moving through us beyond numerous,"" each image connects the natural world of tides and marshes and forests to the human world of documentation and preservation. The image of the keep as a place of safety and as a kind of prison also informs this very strong collection.