Killers

George Mathon’s poetry is concerned with finding relationships in the human and natural worlds. He describes his poetry as existing on the boundary between them. He uses the earth as his office and can often be found sitting in his canvas chair on a beach, beside a stream or in the desert watching the clouds soft-shoe across the sky and the birds at their usual squabbles.

Taproot: Coming Home to Prairie Hill

At its heart, this is a book about the search for place and what that means in relation to a family’s long journey from the brink of annihilation. The place of safety and fulfillment turns out to be atop a Vermont hillside where Martha Leb Molnar discovers and explores nature’s gifts, faces her fears and those of her ancestors, and in elegant language shares the rewards of hanging on to a dream.

Sudden Eden

Neither the beauty nor the brokenness of the world escapes Verandah Porche’s grasp in her newest collection, Sudden Eden. The orchard and the neighbor’s homely sayings share equally with time and eternity. She is a wise poet who knows her land and its neighbors and the deeper truths of living a rural life in which “Late fruit/keeps its edge as frost/fleeces the pasture.” These poems are about the investments one makes in life, in its loves and causes, its earth and trees, its human community.

From the Raft

From the Raft is a book written in wisdom by a poet whose eye sees clearly and comprehends. His gaze transforms the barest of circumstances into stories and celebrates the everyday in human actions and nature’s “green espous[al]” with equal sympathy. There is sadness too as gathering voids fill with what remains (“Crows have arrived….I hear losses….”). In language, Tom Smith finds what remains to celebrate and to mourn and treats each, in its turn, with a wry and tender grace.