Ghost Skin by Diane Bliss

Diane Bliss’s poems brim with the beauty of field, forest, and sky, and teem with their creatures. She invites the reader into her practice of looking—passionate and trained forester, birder, and teacher that she is—to see what catches the eye when “treetops turn to filigree,” when chicory’s “blue flowers / were petals of a touchable sky”—or to just sit back against an old maple with “No idea. / No plan” until a mink “comes undulating” to your feet. Like the surprises that startle us in quiet walking in a wood where we are the visitor, the revelations in these poems stir our “longing for what is still there.” “How,” she asks, “can we miss what isn’t even gone yet?” Yet we do. But it’s here. Reader, don’t miss it.

–Robert Bensen, author of What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems

Bliss hones all her senses to capture the drama of life around her, from her own backyard to the fields, forests, and bodies of water she enters. Yes, the natural world can absorb “our common worries” and “recycle dark energy into light,” but Ghost Skin praises most of all the small lives which can escape our notice unless “a slight start of the heart” alerts us to what we can encounter at the periphery of sight if we are still and receptive enough. Here is language both literal and metaphoric: as winter closes in, “the day becomes shorter of breath”; chicory’s blue flowers become “petals of touchable sky”; a mink “undulating along stream bank”; “the pool where northern lights, / dripping from the Big Dipper, / ripple, then disappear.” As she prefers to “take the plunge” into cold pond water rather than enter gradually, Bliss over and over again choses to “roll wildly my whole being in the stark beauty of this changing reality.”

–Mary Makofske, author of No Angels