Spring Mills

<p>Spring Mills a small town in rural central Pennsylvania becomes in these poems by Mike Schneider a gathering place for four generations of a family over a century of time. Schneider takes readers to where a grandfather recalls using a hand-crank to start his Model T-shining image of youth & freedom-and Guernseys in a pasture bellow to be fed. Readers learn how father and son form links in a chain of manual transmission / hands-on sequenced pattern of the letter H and the poet's sonic facility opens our ears to the metallic / industrial click / of shifting gears. With these poems we also go to where physicists search among what's fizzy out there in the universe-not only for elusive cosmological dark matter but also to hear our inner voices human dark matter. In Once Upon a Time a remarkable marriage of poetry with skilled science writing the Big Bang is an unfolding like a rose in bloom and Love is evolution of the cosmos. What else can we do?-a thought the poem answers with longing for perhaps a simpler time a Spring Mills of Summer evening quietness. A breeze. / The big tree across the street. / Everything made sense.</p><p> </p>