At last, the conversation

Last night I finally sat down and made time to listen to my friend from college, Ilene, and what she had to say about the manuscript. Though it is enormous,
a heavy burden, she was happy to be asked, since she has long ago stopped writing poems, but the poems are still in her although she is unwilling to give voice to them.
She explained that they and the stories she was writing at one time were the opening for a prophetic power that frightened her, the power to foresee death, illness, and accident, not only of her immediate family, but of those she did not know at the time. After some encounters that came too close to the bone for comfort, she stopped writing, unwilling to live with this.
It was a long long conversation that will cost me a lot of money, but it was worth it. She perceived things about the poems that no one else I have spoken with does, and was able to cut through some stylistic nonsense that did not have to be there, allowing me to see through to the poem's impulse and free it. I may not take all of her advice, which will require me at times, as I thought, to reconceive of some of the poems completely, but I will think about it and perhaps act on it in the future. It was good to know that, at least for her, the majority of the poems and the essential design of the manuscript worked okay, and that I can go forward feeling that with some work, this is a viable book.
She kept looking for the writer I used to be long ago, and surprisingly to me, she found that writer there, the voice I thought had been altered beyond recognition since that time. A continent and many years later, I apparently am still there.