Almost Heaven

Lyrical snapshots of the natural world.In his first collection, Hurd explores natures beauty in 40 short, predominantly free-verse poems that honein on common natural objects and eventsa leaf, a rock, rainbows, autumn, etc.with the cinematic qualityof a director fixing no more than a single moment per scene. To heighten the pictorial sense, the poet includesthree black and white photographs of pastoral subjectstwo deer, a babbling brook and an exquisite fawn.Though Hurds tender affinity for nature comes through in these literal and figurative images, their meaningcould resonate more. For instance, Dear One plainly describes the physical and behavioral attributesHermane was brown, / Soft brown, / Short, / Sleek, / Beautiful to those / Who beheld her.of a creature unnameduntil the poems closing thought: She was a dear, / Uh, / Deer, / The four-legged kind. The sudden shift from straight description to casual jocularityis jarring; shutting down possible suggestions conjured by earlier lines. Another distracting quality found here and throughout the collectionis the oppressive use of end punctuation, forcing caesuras sometimes midthought, as in A Leaf: A leaf that endured frost, / High winds, /Rain, / Yet it stayed high in the tree. / One day, / It fell, / Leaving one to wonder, / Not why it fell, / But why it stayed so long. Here a subtle pointabout resiliency is nearly drowned out by each lines final comma, inserting poetic breaths with a practically gasping urgency. When working withsuch clipped lines, the white space on the page provides more than enough pause to allow images both to spill into one another and linger.Quick, nearly engaging depictions of nature that would be better served by fewer declarative statements and greater respect for the power ofthe poetic line.

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