Author Description

All Will Fall Away opens with a young musician's first glorious and desperate experience of New Orleans, where he tastes "what no one said would be good for you/ the sharp burn of that shot on Bourbon Street" and where his "own songs spill out" in the "city of floods." Blues as an explicit theme returns in "Galveston Blues," recalling the storm "that shattered the island to splinters," the island that knows how to sing the blues, "Wanting to wail and cry in Mardi Gras drag/ with the keen guitar." In poems about the joy and ache of long-lasting love ("The Burn" and "Birch Bark,"), the blues of time passing is a haunting undercurrent. Time is a palpable force in poems that trace the abandonment of an old whaling museum, precursor, perhaps to our own abandonment of an earth we might not save because we do not love it enough. "The Work of the Forest" questions whether we have the vision to see our world in a way that inspires us to halt the damage we are doing to our environment before it is too late. Loss emerges as a complicated condition to be endured while witnessing the disappearance of a father suffering from Alzheimer's and a sister-in-law finally succumbing to cancer. But loss is constantly redeemed in the solace of nature, where the rhythmic cries of insects in October signal the possibility of love's last chance, and where the rare sun in winter turns "each bright berry" into "a circle of fire/ signaling plenty to the birds." "All Will Fall Away reinforces the faith in poetry's power to evoke the mystery, beauty, and complexity of existence enriched by myth," observes poet Grey Held. All Will Fall Away returns again and again to love -- erotic passion symbolized in a dream of immense vases of flowers "filled with effervescent water/ like champagne/ bubble trails surging to the top;" the love of a grandmother in distant Nicaragua for her stricken grandson; the faithful love of a gardener who is "rooted in a