Chronicles of Humans with Nature is a follow-up to Still Brooding on a Strong Branch; a pendulum that swings between the memories and experiences of family members and our engagement with the natural world. In this collection there are eighty na-ture and humanistic poems that honor the memory, pay tribute to, and sanctify the lives of loved ones. One of the most central and universal topics for poetry is some aspect of personal sorrow, grief, mourning or another related loss, springing from the central core of the human condition. The poems extend in rivers beyond the loss in terms of their...

In her sixth book, Parables of Passages, Carol Altieri continues her moving and vivid exploration of love, loss, and the solace of the natural world. Beginning with a richly detailed series of poems about her New Hampshire childhood, she writes of the spill of scents, sounds, and colors that left her with memories "sharp as a blade / on my father's whetstone," where her father's astronomy lessons taught her to follow the stars whenever she got "lost in the woods," and where at ten she got "on speaking terms" with a family of sparrows, the source of her lifelong "love for all meanings / and...