A Wild Region

Kate Buckley's poems are dark prayers and lyrical ballads, infused with mystery and awe, respectful of the hard lives lived in the wild region the poet has left behind but still carries within her. She lifts them up, those lost beloveds, so that the dead may speak in her poems, and the hills and valleys and slow running streams. This is how suffering is made to mean, how human lives are woven into the landscape in which they're lived, how the voiceless are given voice -- songs for the mountains/ hummed for the lost. And the stories these poems tell -- finely crafted as the poems are -- are stories that speak to all of us, accessible and clear for all their complicated depth, universal precisely because they're so deeply personal, and so deeply felt. There is so much stunning language in this collection, so much accuracy and grace, and there are so many images that take my breath away, that I'm tempted to quote from the poems at length, but I'm also hesitant to take anything out of its context. So inextricably interwoven are the lives Buckley illuminates here with the landscape she paints, so deftly does she move us through time, that I would urge the reader to begin at the beginning and read straight through, following the trajectory the poems make deeper and deeper into the heart of things. In an age when so much poetry is self-referential to the point of excluding the reader, this is poetry that includes, that matters, and that, in breaking the heart, opens it. -- Cecilia Woloch