Flowers, plants, gardens, insects, birds, sunlight, stars-Sally Cook makes the world of nature come alive with a resonance that goes beyond the eco-friendly posturings of environmentalism. But she is no mere celebrant of the beautiful; the poems in The View From Here connect also to the sometimes savage world of human hurt, disappointment, frustration, and anger. Cook's gaze fixes itself with iron courage, but also with profound pity, on our memories, regrets, emotional friction, and misunderstandings-all of which can be solaced by nature's beauty, but not erased by it. -Joseph S. Salemi Editor, TRINACRIA Sally Cook's poems are not for the faint-of-heart reader. Her thoughts go straight to the gut, like arrows fletched by Emily Dickinson. But doom's electric moccasin will be the least of her readers' worries. Her sharp iambic lines may skin them alive as they are served a bowl of fresh organic berries.

The View From Here is an exercise of breadth and depth that will sober the most drunken sailor with the very air in which he thought he had drowned. In other words, Sally Cook is the master mistress of tragicomic involution, combining lighthearted acerbity with a transcendent earthiness. -C.B. Anderson Author of Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder.