“Bruce Boston often places his poems at a balance point between what is and what’s left. The tenses here are purposeful: the measure is not nostalgia but a carefully nuanced reckoning of the view. “I gather what I can,” he says, beginning with “the lesson of the seed,” and this immediacy, this urgency to name and hold against the slippage of Time is characteristic of his work. By All Lights is simply a pleasure to read and to savor.”
—Peter Everwine
“The Art lies in hiding the art, Horace teaches us, and B.H. Boston is a master of such concealment in poems that are spare and tight, that speak to us without patronizing of things that matter most in this life. I love the delicacy, tenderness and intimacy of pieces such as “I am Reading,” the faith and incantation of poems like “Processional,” and the mystical realism of “Apiary”. This book is about remembering and paying attention and healing and praising. Ultimately, it is about the human spirit—and it soars.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
“In Boston’s poetry we hear “the train / that bluffs its way through snow / in the night Sierra” and with a subtlety beyond measure, “the fronds of podocarpus stirring / their cups of wind”. In the spiritual urgency of these poems, a world is brought forth in its fecundity, the indissoluble blue world, radiant and fragile. Boston is a visionary naturalist, rescuing moments that will not recur with a lyric force harnessed only by the wisest of poets.”
—Carolyn Forché
“Equally at ease in describing the natural world or the freeways of San Diego, Bruce Boston brings to both his exquisite love poems for his wife Marsha and his profound poems of cultural lament an unerring sense of music. With his lyric grace and rapier vision, Bruce Boston is a troubadour for our time.”
—David St. John
B.H. Boston received his BA in English from Cal State University, Fresno, and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006, Boston’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies over the years. A book of his poems, Only the Living, was published by Helix House Press. He is currently Poetry Editor and Consulting Managing Editor for Poetry International at San Diego State University and Curator of the Master Author’s Residency Program at La Jolla Country Day School. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Marsha.
