Her work started out as being about herself, however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes. "Transformations" (1971), which is a re-visionary re-telling of Grimm's Fairy Tales, is one such book. ("Transformations" was used as the libretto for the 1973 opera of the same name by American composer Conrad Susa.) Later she used Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno" and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.