The authority of roses

No postmodern gimmickry, no tricks except all the old ones that every good poet must learn: these lucid, evocative poems put the reader so clearly in the picture that you taste the blackberries of your childhood, shiver at the chill of rainwater down your neck in a western forest, or rake the dust from your hair as you trudge home from the Trojan War. Ross Leckie can capture the fleeting moments when we fully enter the world and believe we belong. At this low point in our country's cultural history, when more and more writers have become topical "content providers" for the ever-gaping maw of the society of the spectacle, those few artists like Ross Leckie who carefully craft their work within the poetic tradition, and who show respect for all the needs -- aural, esthetic, and intellectual -- of the most discerning readers, are more than ever to be valued.