In this, his fifth book of poems, Jerred Metz comes as close to speaking in an inner voice as is humanly possible. Like a sensate scarecrow, he observes everything, “deep/in love with solitary things.”  Theodore Roethke would love these poems, where trees speak, the moon blossoms, and “His hand cradles a fish.” He is “the seahorse,/unfurling its tail, whipping the/water to waves that rush against the shore.” In this remarkable book, Jerred Metz  “harvests jewels” in perfectly polished poems.


Howard Schwartz, author of The Library of Dreams: New and Selected Poems  1965-2013


    Jerred Metz’s poems speak an elemental language of rocks, water, bones and blood. The inner life of dreams, prophecy, and memory figure prominently as do sun, moon, stars and angels. Lines often blossom kaleidoscopically with startling juxtapositions. Worldly experience, “dirt upon a crumbled earth,” paid for “with fool’s gold,” is transformed and transcended in many of these poems, evoking a mystery beyond words.

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Michael Castro, author of Human Rites: Poems

 

Two poems from the book:

 

Even a Vision

Even a dream likes to

dip its stiff finger in honey.

Even a prophesy

wants to clasp the girl splash

ing and singing in a brook.

Even memory loves

the fluttering of smoke.

Even a vision needs

a stick to lean on when

it climbs down through the sky.

 

Below Lafayette Ridge

 

Blanketed against the cold, we sat beside the river

watching the moon rise over the mountain’s spine.

Quickly the earth turned showing first a

faint gleam, then light, then moon

full in October free above the ridge.

From the cold river you offered water

to the moon’s parched oceans.

The moon broke into shimmering

points and slivers in the pool of your hands.