Years Beyond the River - by David Axelrod (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

David Axelrod writes achingly beautiful poems on the growing shadow of climate collapse. His lamentations address our refusal to turn away from the insatiable desire for consumption and material wealth, asking, "Aren't we the fire front, gnawing through dry scrub?" Yet this collection, as it brings us into the intimacy of earth's memory and its survivors reveals the many ways we might learn to praise the abundant sacredness of the greater-than-human world. Like the prophets of old who cried out in the wilderness, Axelrod offers possible visions of healing for "a future world / where a young aspen grove // yields back all of summer's light into air." -Todd Davis, Native Species

Review Quotes

To be inside a David Axelrod poem is to be in a natural world both numinous and unrelentingly physical. His concise, musical language is full of discoveries within which one finds the inner life and the world of seasons, creatures, and things in powerful, meditative interaction that places the poet firmly in the tradition of Roethke and Richard Hugo. But in Years Beyond the River he is also blazing his own unique trail. A splendid book; take it with you into the wild.

-Christopher Howell, The Grief of a Happy Life

In the exquisite naturally charged poems of David Axelrod's seventh collection, Years Beyond the River, an encounter with thorn or wildflower is new life, the rotted heartwood of fir becomes memory, and the delicate brush of a bat wing upon the skin echoes the beloved walking through the dark. Fire-haunted and fire-hunted we exist in a oneness with all things beckoning both death and life. What we know of the soul crosses the span of "Orion's spiral arm" and remembers what it means to be wilderness. There is abundance and loss among the terrible singular notion of rivers and trees passing away. There is beauty, grace, and strength interwoven with the scent of sage in our clothes as we breathe and dream and love.

-Shann Ray, Atomic Theory 7