A Life for a Life by Steve Hallett

With gentleness and wisdom, visual precision and imagination, Steve Hallett’s observant eye invites us to explore the lost, the forgotten, and the misunderstood. Whether standing with him in the collieries of the Welsh Valley or alongside Tibetan peasants at a sky burial, these patient poems evoke a world that is frequently overlooked and all too often silenced. A Life for a Life celebrates the jubilant wonder of the every day and calls us to retrieve ourselves in the vastness of this place. 
–Melissa Fraterrigo, author, Glory Days

This book loves words like “ginnel,” “rundle,” “col,” and “scree.” Steve Hallett, a professor of horticulture, brings to poetry his fluency with the changing natural world around us. He urges us to “consider that compost pile / where more microbes than stars in the sky / convert a billion dead gods / into fertile soil.” At the end of his title poem, Hallett gives us the image of his father’s ashes fertilizing the roots of an oak and becoming acorns to be ingested by a squirrel, whose body will be eaten in turn by foxes or hawks. A Life for a Life is a book that celebrates such transformations and converts dead gods into living ones. Language and imagination serve as Steve Hallett’s microbes to break down the many worlds he has seen and recreate them for us anew. 

–Donald Platt, author of Man Praying and Tornadoesque