The Blue Marble Gazetteer

It's hard to imagine a poet who could take more joy in nature both earthly and human. In Blue Marble Gazetteer David Leff looks closely always and revels in the names of things; the catalogs of species that recur throughout are delicious to mind and ear. Still an elegiac tone haunts the book; David loves the planet as much as he fears for its demise. But this world of open wounds is blessed with fellow sojourners: the poet's wife and children his neighbors and all the beings of the natural world who­-like the hermit thrush whose whistles penetrate...the heart's own thickets-provide ongoing comfort. Blue Marble Gazetteer is a marvel a final gift from a poet whose exuberant spirit is very much alive in his poems. ­-Clare Rossini author of Lingo