Return of the Orb Weaver by Michael D. Jones

In Return of the Orb Weaver, Michael Jones has us “begin where we are with what we have,” and the poems in this book are faithful to that directive.  They are built from careful observation, from a wonderful attention paid to the ordinary, to the details that always surround us but too seldom are tallied up so that they compose what is vital to us all, the world in which we live our immediate lives. And in this book those lives are scored by time in vital ways: one major theme is elegiac, tracing out the ways of grief brought on by the death of ones we love; the other is seasonal, marking the cycle that shapes this volume, life returning yearly as does the orb weaver.  These poems—individually and as part of a thoughtfully worked structure—reward the reader in many ways.  They are the work of an accomplished imagination and a forthright intelligence.

—Edward Hoeppner

“How will the sun rise when we forget the flour?” asks Michael Jones in his poem “Sweet Complexities.” A good question, but rhetorical as well, for Return of the Orb Weaver provides plenty of answers in these lyrical meditations on the domestic particulars of a life lived faithfully and attentively. As with “The Hoarder Mouse in Bronze Relief,” Jones is “compelled to gather these shiny things / Against the nothingness of otherwise” and offer them as confirmation of one father/son/husband’s “legacy of industry.”   

—Phillip Sterling, author of And Then Snow