Acclaimed for his superior craftsmanship ("half the meaning of a lyric poem is in the music") and his summoning of sentiment without sentimentality, John Donlan in his sixth collection confronts our inevitable sense of loss and mourning as we live through the sixth extinction of the natural world. Yet always his work reveals the comfort and courage provided by close and loving observation of the processes of life. "The book that tells us how to be / lies always open," he assures us. How much nature is a part of us, and we a part of nature, is an enduring theme in his work. Yet he wryly accepts our separateness: "Finger-combing deerfly carcasses / out of what's left of my hair / I puzzle over my most minute machinery," and he concedes that "The path from there to here . . . overwhelms / as when a widower, hearing his wife's name, / weeps." And always his imagination inhabits and reimagines wilderness: a frog carried off by a hawk cries, "I'm flying, I've turned into a bird."

John Donlan's lyric work seeks the connection between lives-not just the life of a coyote and the life of a man, or the peaceful cacophony of a pond in summer and the life of the human listener-but between the life before birth, and the life after. He reveals the wilderness to us moment by moment, while simultaneously driving us back into our own nature-a process readers, lifted by Donlan's imagery, rhythms, and insights, can only experience as pure pleasure. Here beauty is the engine that enspirits the mind, freeing us from contemporary despair and the illusion we've left nature behind. Devil's Paintbrush. In my slow-burning archive orange hawkweed thrives in granite-charactered soil spalled off the basement stone, a beaver labours up her steep skid road logging poplar for food and shelter, wind drives rivers of ripples down a pond. Everything here knows what to do. I investigate every valve, work and rework notes to husks, skeletal remains, survivors who revive experience. I try to memorize, to make some pictures to walk into, in the final time when I can't walk or hear or see, and see lake-cradling pink granite, its orange earth, its skin of lives flickering, flickering.