The poems in this collection range widely, in time and location, from spontaneous memories drawn from the poet's early childhood living by the sea of Japan, to a fuller series of cross-cultural observations, from his maturing---and finally aging---vision, after returning to a small Illinois town, surrounded by cornfields, pig-barns, and grazing horses, seventy miles west of Chicago. But wherever located, even in those concluding pieces set among the foothills of the poet's present life in rural Virginia, the unifying concept of the entire volume is the Far-Eastern belief that the aging process of mankind, and of all the "ten thousand" connected lives of the plants and animals around us, can be viewed as organic harmony: from wondrous to humorous---never to be feared.
From the Back Cover:
Dan Stryk's poems possess a fine power of evocation---of places and objects, of personals and other living things. A reader finds landscapes or settings, and their inhabitants, that come alive in richly textured but unvaryingly precise language, guided too by a firm rhythmic and musical sense.
-- Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
Stryk's poems are grounded in his effortless and strict voice. And his voice is an eye.
-- William Heyen
Here is a voice that tells us what we should know, what he will have us know in spite of ourselves. And we listen: we know he has it right.
-- Jim Barnes, Editor
The Chariton Review