“Kelly Moffett’s bird blind confirms what her earlier collection, Waiting for a Warm Body to Fill It, suggested: Moffett is the poetry world’s Joni Mitchell, a writer whose work is possessed of such grace, lyricism, and wisdom that each poem is both psalm and sacrament, reminding us that the world is only as beautiful, as spiritual, as we allow it to be. As essential a book on the individual’s relationship to the natural world as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
—
Paul Kareem Tayyar, author of Magic Carpet Poems, In the
Footsteps of the Silver King, and Postmark Atlantis
“In bird blind, we might be naturalists or killers. Kelly Moffett’s calm but anguished speaker observes what she sees. She almost becomes landscape herself as she watches. But landscape is other, you can’t get around it, it holds your trauma in colors and textures and can split you apart as you walk it. Moffett lets us see the self angry and reaching and wronged in lovely stark poems that smell of salt.”
—Cathy Wagner, author of Nervous Device, My New Job, and Miss America
“The lyrics in Kelly Moffett’s bird blind are so graceful, so striking in imagery, that I have to keep reminding myself they are drawing me along on the most precarious of epic journeys, that craggy steep footpath from loss to consolation. Throughout this journey, the poet’s keen eye continually searches the natural landscape for solace—and sometimes solace is found—but more often her poems show that grief is as dogged as our need for consolation, as confirmed in her stunning insight that ocean waves breaking onto shore sound much like the roar of a raging Colorado wildfire.”
—Kathleen Driskell, author of Blue Etiquette, Next Door to
the Dead, and Seed Across Snow
