NOTES FOR MARC HARSHMAN'S LOCAL JOURNEYS

During the author's meditative walk through the seasons in the backcountry of West Virginia, he writes of those moments of beauty and immanence when "the breeze slows,/ the cricket quiet/ returns." This is just about as satisfying a book of poems as we can ever hope to find.

--Jared Carter

If words could save a world, Marc Harshman's Local Journeys would save the woods and small farms of Marshall County, West Virginia, where he made his home for a decade. Harshman's vision is so attuned to this landscape that, as the speaker says in "Mushrooms," he "can hardly step/ without finding." And what he finds is "the real story" of intricate connections, of "these little things that happen" that change the seasons, that make life possible. Poem by poem, we travel deeper into "a miraculous maze/ of shadow and bark" where the poet "open[s]/ the trees/ as if/ as if opening/ the rooms of paradise."

--George Ella Lyon