Dismantling the Hills

The poems in Dismantling the Hills are love songs to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to its small towns and its people, to its wildness: 'the dust of stars, the grain of timber, / the burls in the hearts of men.' Distinguished by their masterful craft and human sympathy, these poems constitute not just an unusually fine and readable first collection, but an evocation of place and spirit worthy of comparison with such American classics as Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and Frost's North of Boston. - Ed Ochester ""These are poems of place and generation, lyrically intense and intensely crafted. But the force of this work lies not just in narrative and memory, but in the refusal at every point to allow locale to become mere landscape. The rivers, fields, and ridges of these poems are not decorative. They are alive with work - with chainsaws, tractors, work crews, and wood chip piles. Most of all, they are vivid with hurt and loved human beings, fiercely imagined and named. This, above all, is what makes this such a powerful and persuasive first volume of poems."" - Eavan Boland