This collection is beautifully crafted, exquisitely lyrical and astutely observed; poems of place and time that stun you with the originality of their imagery, poems of landscape, the natural world, buried narratives and dreams, pitch perfect memories of rural childhoods, the caesarean birth of a calf, how time passes, how little we know of each other, revelations so full of mystery they speak to our non-verbal centres as only music or abstract art can do. These are the spells and charms of a poet at the height of his powers. -Chrys Salt, MBE
In Every Slow Thing Lusk’s poems achieve a radiance that illumines and penetrates the surfaces of his American life. The collection exposes a personal history refracted through the mind of the recorder, a time lapse sequence of the act of imagining fictions of memory and self. Careful observation of nature and his psyche has taught him things to say underwater and to examine what cliffs, those towering monuments of time, yield after a rockfall. With searing honesty, Lusk’s precise, at times mythic, language calls attention to life’s curiosities and enriching failures. Each poem ends in a rippling silence and without complaint. -Anton Floyd, author of Falling into Place and Depositions
This stunning sequence of poems from Daniel Lusk incorporates physical, emotional and psychic phenomena-from the poet’s back yard to the farthest reaches of the universe. Part auto-biographical, his poems are also attentive and wakeful to nature. Here we find life, lyric odes to the wonders of the world, and an empathic connection with individuals the poet has encountered: a New Guinea man in a clay mask, an artist’s model, a dying hermit, a family grieving the loss of a child. Ancient as breath and the beating of the heart is our urge to find meaning. Lusk traces inexplicable moments like a master filmmaker, miraculously gifted at capturing thought in motion. -Afric McGlinchey, Tied to the Wind, Ghost of the Fisher Cat, and other books
