Spring Mills

Spring Mills, a small town in rural, central Pennsylvania, becomes in these poems by Mike Schneider a gathering place for four generations of a family over a century of time. Schneider takes readers to where a grandfather recalls using a hand-crank to start his Model T-"shining image of youth & freedom"-and Guernseys in a pasture bellow to be fed. Readers learn how father and son form links in a chain of "manual transmission, / hands-on sequenced pattern of the letter H," and the poet's sonic facility opens our ears to the "metallic / industrial click / of shifting gears." With these poems, we also go to where physicists search among what's "fizzy out there in the universe"-not only for elusive cosmological "dark matter" but also to hear our inner voices, human "dark matter." In "Once Upon a Time," a remarkable marriage of poetry with skilled science writing, the Big Bang is an "unfolding like a rose in bloom" and "Love is evolution of the cosmos. What else can we do?"-a thought the poem answers with longing for, perhaps, a simpler time, a Spring Mills of "Summer evening quietness. A breeze. / The big tree across the street. / Everything made sense."