Michael P. Hill

"Quiet wonder and clear-eyed serenity flow through Michael P. Hill’s poems, which find the sacred in the everyday and the modest in the sacred: a stranger’s grief at the vet’s office; a fisherman’s view of a stalking heron; reflections on those who’ve left us. These are works in which simplicity is celebrated, experience vividly recalled, and the natural world impeccably observed, and all of them—all—are deeply felt. One of the particular joys of Hill’s work is his apparently effortless equanimity; he’s not seeking to reassure us—that would be cheap, egotistical—but that’s precisely what these poems do in their calm embrace of the complicated multivalence of these works-in-progress we call lives. The reader enters the river with its swirling, sun-dappled surface and its teeming life below, then reemerges feeling more connected to the earth, more appreciative of the limited time we have on it, and more connected to those with whom we share it. It’s a joy."

Doug Dorst, author of S., The Surf Guru and Alive in Necropolis