In Felt Treeling

n in felt treeling, Michael Cross has created a pastoral theatre in which elaborate patterns of resemblance are poetically measured by countervoiced assertions of autonomy and difference. The world is invited to " err" and to " air" its intentions freely, treely, freewheelingly, treelingly. These poems are " felt" doubly, as both noun and verb, with their layered emotional registers and their playfully theatrical costume dressing. As this carefully scored work is animated by the vocal fabric of its setting in the woods, the reader becomes transfixed, like Daphne, within the lush, felt landscape of the poems. -- Elizabeth Willis