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.
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.