In this beautifully crafted volume, Parini takes on the natural world in all its splendor, allowing aptly chosen images to express a full emotional palette. From the first poem, a tightly woven sonnet lamenting the disappearance of falling stars, "their dwindling into dark with less and less / of anything a witness might recall," it is clear we are in the hands of a master. The natural world is seen as a place of redemption, where a feast is made of what has fallen and the wind, as patient as ever, circles and assumes this shape or that one, always moving on: from leaf to lizard, seed to finch to splatter in mud, where breath begins, where eyes fall open, where the world invents itself again. Parini is nothing less than a poet-alchemist, transforming the ordinary facts of weather and season into gold. If Ralph Waldo Emerson could read these poems, he'd nod and smile in the knowledge his transcendentalist vision endures. --Martha Silano