"Sydney Lea has always been a poet equally eloquent and wide-eyed before reality. This self-aware book of experience, stock-taking, and memory finds him just now, just here, a person still hopeful in the face of it all, a poet at the height of his powers." --Jane Hirshfield "Because Sydney Lea is a poet who doesn't stand outside his subject, his work is committed, above all, to everything that constitutes connection--nature, community, and family. His latest book is a testament to what can be said, what can be felt at the transition between life and death, the marginal line between what he knows and what he will lose. Although he admits, 'I had a dress rehearsal for death,' his attention to 'the bright whole' governs these poems. Seeing a ruffled grouse dead in the snow, he wonders why 'Death looks so brilliant. Its dead eyes rimmed and white.' It is not so much the recognition of change and loss that Lea appraises, but the consciousness of being itself.

Looking closely and surely, as Lea has shown us throughout his long, remarkable career, is how this poet embraces the world around him with gratitude and joy." --Cleopatra Mathis --.