Further along and down the road apiece from where she took her leave of us, Joanna Newsom plays on. Breathe deep and equalize your today-ears to the new world of 'Divers...'

The music of 'Divers' is a wonder of considered arrangements-a taut line, threaded with the pearls of passed and passing times; a round, a chant, an incantation, a ray of light diverted eleven ways, into eleven songs that striate, in chromatic collusion, their simultaneous arc, a span that takes in lifetimes, but is immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity.

At the center of the mythos and the maelstrom is the woman. Divers reminds us that Newsom is a melodist, above all-an acolyte of melody and beauty in form, a crackerjack of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy.