The Ancient Ways

Jeff Bernstein's The Ancient Ways explores family and memory, a rural life through the seasons, wrought with New England mettle and a subtle sense of longing. Weaving lyric intensity and narrative drive, the poems traverse sandy Vineyard cart-paths and Vermont hills and gardens, skilled in the art of attention. Bernstein is attuned to the natural world in all its beauty and wonder, to the unfurling of fiddleheads, the tenderness of dogs. The Ancient Ways bears witness to grief and loss while holding onto an abiding belief in love-"an improbable / tapestry of light and dark." I will return again and again to these wise, beautiful, bittersweet poems.

-Diana Whitney, author of Dark Beds



In The Ancient Ways, Jeff Bernstein takes us down paths of memory with language rich in detail. This is a poet who travels a long road, always noticing, always questioning. We willingly follow him. Certainty is gone, and he asks what can we depend on? Natural beauty, the love of human and four-legged members of the family alike. In "My Father Meets My Old Brown Labrador in the Elysian Fields," he speaks across species to an especially beloved dog: "Isabelle sweet Isabelle / please don't leave his side / as he surveys meadow & birches / the vast unbroken expanse of winter..." The poet carries the bittersweet with grace and thus us along with him.

-Cecele Kraus, author of Harmonica