Provenance

In Provenance, Rick Campbell looks clearly at a life with "father, mother, brother, dead," where the past rises in poems that read like beautiful sad postcards. These are poems of wisdom come by the hard way. But this book is not elegy, even if we "can't count on angels anymore." These poems also richly celebrate-river, heron, hawk, friendship, love-"affirming the heart's / wild desire." Even as they chronicle loss, they are singing the shining world into being where, at least for a moment, everything "is a small great blessing." - Lisa Zimmerman