ELEMENTALS: EARTH / AIR / FIRE / WATER by Robert Lima

Robert Lima’s statement is pure, untroubled by trends and isms. His observations dart, like light on water, from image to image, each with surprising allusions.

–Willis Barnstone, poet, author of The Other Bible

From his native Cuba to Japan, from Egypt to Ireland and the English Lake District of Wordsworth, from the geologic past of pre-history to the present hour, Robert Lima explores the myths and physical realities of the elements that make our world. Like Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni with their apparently simple melody initially masking their true depth, Lima’s lyrical series on the four elements reveals surprising complexity. In brief poems, both ancient and immediate, the poet investigates earth, air, fire, and water. In the end, Lima connects the primeval forces of nature to our current human lives.

–James Deahl, poet, author of Red Haws to Light the Fields\

The poems in Robert Lima’s newest collection, Elementals, draw upon the four classical elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and the book is organized into successive sections that explore each of these in turn. Yet rather than solely re-presenting the elements in various locales in the present-day poet’s eye, the poems reveal unions that are organic and ongoing—ultimately connecting the elements to each other, uniting the human with the natural world, fixing the corporeal to the spiritual. Lima frequently returns to ancient myths and stories to meditate on essential aspects of being and questions of being that are in us as peoples and cultures across the globe and across time. Elementals is a collection of pure lyrics that surprise and inform us of their truths with the sleightest of hand.

–Shara McCallum, poet, author of Madwoman.