" 'And if I hear my name/ringing out of these woods/I will rise through this loneliness/and be nourished by the call' writes Richard Levine in his austerely beautiful new book That Country's Soul. I think of Chief Seattle's observation that, if all the animals were gone, humans would die of "a great loneliness of the spirit." For this is Levine's burden: to posit a relationship to nature when there may be no time "except for goodbyes." The forest he has created in these pages is mythic, but the poet enters it humbly, with "pine pegs and a spool of twine" and with a task that is profoundly urgent and transcendent. This is a lovely collection, and to me, in the subtlest of ways, a call to environmental action."
~ D. Nurkse, Border Kingdom, Voices Over Water, Burnt Island, The Fall.
Praise for A Language Full of Wars and Songs:
“Richard Levine is a seasoned word-respondent. From the fragility of nature … to the war-world of his “Mud-Walking” poems, always he sings a polished tune, at time elegiac or with light playfulness, but always with intelligence flaming in it.”
~ James Ragan, Too Long A Solitude, The Hunger Wall, Womb-Weary
“Most of the these poems reach the heart immediately and refuse to leave or be still afterward … the gorgeous, subtle ones about father, the searing battle poems, the scary, unsettling few about a relationship going wrong or thankfully nipped in the bud or changing over time, and this unclassifiable “Annette,” which is as stunning this time around as the first I read it, and remains so with each reading.”
~ Rhina Espaillat, Where Horizons Go, (T. S. Eliot Prize), Rehearsing Absence, (Richard Wilbur Award).
