Signposts & Hedges by David Melville

 

Within the pull of this beautiful book by David Melville, readers will find compassion and desire as the ceremonies of a life lived close to the earth, close to the body, and close to love.  The qualities of attention are scrupulous in these pages.  It is a pleasure to read a poet like David Melville who tends to the many contours of the living in a manner that is direct, honest, and wise.

–David Biespiel, two-time Oregon Book Award winner

 

With a delight in both fixed and open forms, with wide-ranging passions that draw him to Dante, Rumi, Le Guin, and Neruda, David Melville brings to the page settings as diverse as Eden, Denali, Cape Meares, a Deschutes County road, and a peat-smoky whisky shop.  Melville’s poems ring with strong metaphors, inventive imagery, and often rollicking music.  Urging us into a world that’s both robust and contemplative, his work implores us:  “Those things you do /do them from the flow/ of hidden waters that move/ within you.  All that you do /do from that river of joy.”  In every poem, he celebrates “this wild, delicious life.”

–Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

 

To travel through the poems of David Melville’s Signposts & Hedges is to experience worlds coming apart and finding new form, transformations that encourage us to “insist no more on going only where you want to go./  Ask your way to the river/ where many currents/ flow together in harmony.”  Carefully attuned to the physicality of the earth, these poems also track the cosmos; with elegance and humor, they explore and demonstrate what it means to change.

–Peter Rock, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and Utah Book Award winner