Rick Smith's spare yet dense poetry is reminiscent of Basho, the Japanese haiku master, and displays much of the same restraint and discipline. But Smith's poetry is not limited by any specific form, other than the sound and feel of the language itself, to which he pays particularly close attention.

The dominant factors here are voice and imagery These aren't just more hum-drum tales of domestic realism posing as poetry, nor are they "nature poems" as such. The figure of the wren is the continuous metaphorical thread that runs through this compact, elegant book, appearing and reappearing in various guises and incarnations; as nest builder, as potential prey, or as chimerical shadow flitting through the clouds, creating a sort of palimpsest of mythical manifestations in settings as diverse as Madagascar, Dakota, Lisbon and the Flatiron Building in New York City. In some poems we're seeing the world from the point of view of omniscient observer, giving the poems an added dimension of self-reflexive introspection. The world as wren, the wren as the world.

Rick Smith's poetry is eloquent, lyrical and highly vocative of the sense of nature that us wingless creatures don't normally have access to (or have lost touch with), addressing the reader with a flutter of wings, a flash of thought or a swoop through boundless skies. Judith Bever's pen and ink drawings compliment the poems in a thoughtful way, amplifying the already unified feeling of this collection.