Light from a Small Brown Bird

Poetry. "These are mysterious poems, unlike much being written now in this country. To find things like them, you may have to go back at least a decade to some of the work being done then under the freshening influence of European poetry. I can only guess at some of the sources of his imagery and his personal darkness of tone; but whatever they may have been it seems to me that they have become part of him, revealed now in poems long thought about and carefully written, rich and quiet."—John Haines "Like some primitive craftsman, Rich Ives engages his medium with the care and patience of the woodcarver, the glassblower, the silversmith, to reveal the hidden lives of objects that pass through his hand and eye. His poems sometimes move in halflight, sometimes break into sudden clarities, restoring our kinship with remote ancestors, the possibilities of our buried selves."—Madeline DeFrees "One need only stop and listen to what's being said in this collection to know Rich Ives is a master at allowing each object and situation he encounters to poke its head out of its own complicated and deep realities into his, combining with all his daily actions what it is each one does best so that the resultant poems are not so much the relating of an incident as they are the actual incident itself."—Paul B. Roth