"These poems balance between endings and beginnings, between the twilit melancholy of evening and the jubilant rebirth of morning. A grandfather loses his memory, while a toddler meets his shadow for the first time. Survivors tend the graves of ancestors, while the stories of those ancestors, handed down, light the way for those now living. Even while she laments the losses that beset any life, Wagner also celebrates the goodness of growing things in poems charged with the clear light of praise." --Scott Russell Sanders, Author, Hunting for Hope

This book you're holding represents years' worth of discipline and labor, of time and travel and, as you'll discover, the pure joy of attention and love of language. The thing that makes a poet undertake a particular project is a mystery, finally. One day Shari Wagner was called to understand something, and the journey she decided to take was a meditative one, through the labyrinth of nature and time in a particular place in this world. The result is a gift, this collection of poems. I don't know of a writer, with the exceptions of Gene Stratton-Porter (the subject of several of these...