Stand Still in the Light by Milton J. Bates

“Stand Still in the Light,” Milton Bates urges us in his title. Stand still because then you might witness a lake’s honeycombed surface as ice begins to thaw, or notice that a red squirrel’s diet is different from a gray one’s, or observe quail shaking their wings in dust. You might hear a glacier calve or see a nighthawk skim the tree line. When Milton Bates enters a place—whether the shores of Lake Superior or the jungles of Vietnam—he learns it thoroughly and describes it memorably. Afterward, the creatures who live there might simply go on with their lives, but we readers will be changed and grateful for it.

—Lynn Domina, author of Framed in Silence

Stand Still in the Light is a book of witnessing and of remembering. Like the “Tracking Snow” celebrated in the poem of that title, its pages are a sensitive register of presences that might easily be missed. They are also a memorial of incidents and encounters that might be casually or willfully forgotten. Places, especially the deeply known and loved north woods of the poet’s later years and the intensely experienced Vietnam of his youthful military service, infuse the poetry. The young man who, home from war and walking once-familiar Berkeley streets, wondered “where he was, where on earth he was,” becomes a poet able to “sit perfectly still, / observing how the birches / catch light from the water.”

–Eleanor Berry, past president, National Federation of State Poetry Societies and author of No Constant Hues.