Title: The Birds of Passage
Author: Anne Porter
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, Hudson, New York

At first glance, one is inclined to label Anne Porter as a devotional poet whose richly texture narratives tend toward the metaphysical: Fire, most beautiful of flowers; and the colloquial :we know little/we call tell less. Indeed, the first porter poem I came upon-framed and hanging on a staircase wall in the painter Darragh Park's home-is titled A Nativity for My Friends. Her humble surrender to her faith recalls the poetry of George
Herbert, but just as Herbert's God has feared in The Pulley, Porter can rest in nature as well as find solace in her belief in the God of nature. In her stunning long poem, In charters, she has arrived on foot from Paris to witness this tidal wave of the abbath/Rising up out of the wheat, and will enter the forest of praise.

Marc Cohen