Learning To Tell Time

This is a book of loss—elegiac verses for the poet’s wife, his mother, the father he never met, for ancestors known only from photographs, and the ever changing land he holds as home. It is also a book of renewal. Joe Whitten carries us from the tender to the heart wrenching, from the sentimental to the homespun. What begins in sadness, with coming winter and the death of his beloved wife, finds quiet restoration in the expectation of coming spring. —Robert Gray