An overpowering sense of nostalgia is the motive force that drives the intensely lyrical poems of Stern's eighth book of poetry. Each poem is a poignant song of love and longing as the poet, now past middle age, looks back on the transcendent moments of his childhood. "How much I loved you in those days,/ how free I felt," he says of a first love. He remembers his father who owned "fifty wide ties," his friends and mentors (Kenneth Burke and Guy Daniels), his estranged wife, now like a flower "pink with brown edges." But mostly he remembers nature in the form of possum skulls, sheep, blackbirds, meadowlarks, trees, and wildflowers. "All things/ aspire to music," says Stern, and his poems are musical transcriptions of the beauty and pain that define life itself. -- Library Journal
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