Rich Bowering

Big Fire at Spahn Ranch Rich Bowering

In this collection of strikingly original poems, each piece develops an organic, internal mythology through strong use of voice, symbolism, and sense of place. Many of the poems are set in rural locales, and the voices are generally ghostly ones, in which the speaker recounts a memory or a post-death return to a place of significance. An emphasis on pacing and musicality advances the direction of each poem, many of which utilize variants of traditional forms, particularly sestinas and sonnets. As the participants in these poems wander the landscapes of their past actions and grieve for the fragmentary and unreliable nature of memory, the reader won't soon shake their presence, which from now on will lurk nearby. We are encouraged tacitly to look more closely at each element that makes up a moment, because we never know which detail will end up being the telling one when viewed from the perspective of eternity.