Linda Fischer‘s new chapbook is aptly titled Glory, and that’s exactly what the reader will find within its pages — the celebration of the glory of life writ large in poignant, superbly crafted poems. Fischer keenly observes her immediate surroundings: her beloved garden with its transient denizens, and distills her observations with a deft use of language that is both entertaining and captivating. These are poems that ask the reader to “attend me” as they demonstrate a three dimensional world of everyday plants and animals — as if to take the reader by the hand, leading them down an often bittersweet garden path. Dickinson’s famous entreaty to her beloved Austin, “Prithee, my brother, Into my garden come!” comes to mind, and I think, like me, readers of Fischer’s Glory will find the journey well worth it.
–Joseph Dorazio, author of As Is, Remains to Be Seen, and Poems of the Fifth Sun
Rating: 
[5 of 5 Stars!]
A warbler in one of the many fine poems appearing in Glory pours “out its abundant heart into the white light of morning,” and Linda Fischer pours out her abundant heart as well, as she describes the glories of gardens, both her mother’s and her own, where there are: “tips of daffodils and narcissus reaching for the sun,” “the perfect juxtaposition of purple coneflower with globe thistle,” giant zinnias—“oranges and reds, hot pinks, gold,” sky-blue larkspur, glossy-leaved magnolias, “burnished holly, rusty pods of fern, a red blaze of winterberry.” How can we not imagine Eden, restored? Here, she “drinks the scent of lilacs with her coffee,” dreams of “peonies swelling like gaudy balloons.” About all this abundance, Fischer “cannot help but sing, and glory—glory!” and you will, too, dear reader, after reading this delightful lyrical collection.
–Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]
Every gardener, Linda Fischer reminds us, “pit[s] herself … against the forces of rank nature,” and Glory records the intensities of that impossible struggle, as Fischer’s gardener – her “dreamer” – works to reclaim her mother’s overgrown garden, “cheat[ing] time for three whole days together”; or mourns “what more / I might have done before / her sense of color damped”; or relishes in consolation the “impertinence” of ferns, the “frenzy” of squirrels, the “stealth footfalls” of deer, the creek’s “ceaseless quarrels.” Though loss is the constant that rules the garden of our lives, Fischer’s poems glory in the struggle, seizing each day though it’s all “only to be eclipsed by snow”: “if there be music,” she asserts triumphantly, “I will hear it,” and that’s a resolution, and a promise, for us all.
–Nathalie F. Anderson, author of Quiver, Following Fred Astaire, and Crawlers
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]
To enter Linda Fischer’s Glory is to live for a magical time among resplendent gardens where the rhythms of the natural world reveal to us our own life-rhythms and put us deeply in touch with our intuitive and essential selves. These are beautifully crafted poems, sometimes elegiac, sometimes celebratory, that enlarge our sense of connection to the earth and to each other, glorying in all that we are, and all that we are not but might become.
–Gregory Djanikian, author of So I Will Till the Ground, Years Later, and Falling Deeply into America
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]
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