This book of resonant, assured and rewarding poems come from a true connection with a lived place where nature and the human-made habitat intertwine in ways that are not always easy. Rachael Mead has a gift for compassion and intimate detail leavened with self-irony and poised regard for the places she inhabits or moves through, the beings, human and non-human, she encounters, and the elements and dangers she lives with. Empathetic without sentimentality, Mead has found all the material she needs for poetry in her own vicinity: the mutability of life, the histories that have made us, and the responsibility we bear for what we’ve done to our places. Mead also treasures language and deftly uses its resources of metaphor, narrative, voice and syntax to explore her Sixth Creek and its surrounds and offer readers far distant from it some new knowledge about the world. (Publication abstract)
