"Not a book to race through but rather one to savor, Ron Searls' Trees of Life and Shade includes both formal and free verse poems about trees, yes, but also poems about the Internet, volcanoes, cancer and T-cell counts, a Chinese pillow, Chopin, a dreaming cello, a puppet like a poem, myth, indeed the whole wild cosmos spinning with ants and termites to stars and planets. The collection is music in both subject and sound. 'Holographic cities pulse on the skins of brown onions.' I think of Baudelaire or maybe Walt Whitman on a cosmic scale."
-Elizabeth Bodien, author of
Blood, Metal, Fiber, Rock
and
Oblique Music: A Book of Hours
, and the forthcoming
Journeys with Fortune
"Ron Searls, in his art as in his life, bridges the gulf C. P. Snow warned of between the culture of science and of literature."
-Mark Pawlak, author of
Reconnaissance, New and Selected Poems
"As few others are, these poems are intent on the recovery from past concealments of self-encounters which bring us face to face with the full wonders he's coaxed from nocturnes, seasons, aubades, laments, exotic cafes, Mnemosyne, herself, cancer and even the internet."
-G. E. Schwartz, author of
Only Others Are, World,
Thinking in Tongues
"He guides us through history, looking down at an artist thumbing the clay of words, the longing of a lost cello, the lost rulers and old gods."
-Robin Sinclair, author of
Letters to My Lover from Behind Asylum Walls
"In Searls' vision the convergence of the metaphysical with the materiality of the everyday produces striking results."
-Laura Johanna Braverman, author of
Salt Water (forthcoming)