Deer Hoof on River Cobbles

There's a sense in Walker Abel's poetry that life is always a little bigger than we can know, that each moment contains more mystery, that the earth has endless capacity to open us into an ever more expansive sense of beauty and realization. Perhaps part of an American lineage that would include Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver, among others, Abel's poems explore with lyrical and sensuous language the openhearted self that is broken, mended, and can find a grace beyond ego and human drama. Like fellow wanderers, we are invited on a journey of "falling into the cupped hands of the world". This is richly imaginative writing, surprising and sudden in its imagery, confident as nature and the subconscious are in the creative depth from which they can draw. As in much of his previous work, Abel's allegiance to mountains, rivers, and oceans is so intimate that it can seem the wild earth goes beyond mere setting or context to become a story teller, a protagonist that sings itself into the poems.