In Everything Barren will be Blessed the images are immediate and memorable, of hot Southern California valleys and desert populated with wild and civilized life-coyotes, hawks, egrets, pistachio and almond groves, humans: Crows never make excuses, / unlike us-but like us / complain bitterly about their blessings. These poems remind us of the significance of water, the importance of our relationship with nature, and our mortality: the way we watch a stranger go by, / wonder where he’s going, if anywhere, / and forget him as soon as he’s gone. Our isolation and our coexistence with nature must be inevitable: An old coyote alone in the fog, / somehow lost where he lives, / looking over his shoulder / in a way we all recognize, Don Thompson’s poems coalesce into a collective voice for the San Joaquin Valley of California (Allan M. Jalon, in the LA TIMES). His lifelong immersion in agricultural landscape is as clear as the water and stone in Preacher Valley: Everything we need to know / has been written in unhurried longhand / between the hills and the sky. / You can trace it with your finger.