"In her essential new collection, The End of the Clockwork Universe , Fleda Brown echoes A. R. Ammons's statement that 'a poem is a walk,' not only in her sequence of ten 'Walk' poems, but in all the poems, which move with a wandering gait and sensibility, in which 'every step is fearful / but so tender, like walking barefoot on rocks.' The tenderness is distinctly unsentimental, as it leads to reportage from the concrete wisdom of the senses. We associate the walk-poem with the natural world, and Brown is brilliantly adept at witnessing it, with humor and heartache, from the sweet pea to the snapping turtle, spring grasses to black holes, extending to us the awareness that much of what we tell ourselves about the world is projection, which comes 'bouncing back at us / like a mirror, while the tree or whatever goes on being / itself.' Brown is buoyed by the fact that things themselves go on without us and without our poems. 'You can only walk so long / before you start trying to fix the world, or yourself, / or you start thinking of the walk as medicinal, / or a quest, Dante-esque.' She comes to something else, here, a sort of empathic neutrality, even with a pile of dead flies, even as she contends with breast cancer.

It is an awareness of delicate immensity and hopeless generosity. 'You're not so much giving / a poem but singing like the cricket,' she writes, 'not because you're headed hopelessly / downriver, but who's left to sing, if not you?'".