In the work of the late Alex Leavens, the reader finds compelling poetry of place with a poet who serves as guide and teacher to the backcountry Pacific Northwest. But also found in his poems is a student of witness: we experience the "behaviors and talents of the cold," see tracks of bears "that won't heal over," admire a "thin, wet brush" of a mink at "that lake nobody knows." With maturity and mtier, Alex held a steady gaze over difficult landscapes of harsh seasons, centuries of human intervention, and increasingly, traumatically, fire.-John Miller, author of Olympic
The poems in Alex Leavens' collection, Horsethief Meadows, measure the human against the "circumference of the world." Leavens' narrator is a shapeshifter moving through that world, helping us to remember we are all one: "and the wind/ found its way down/ into the dry mouth of the badger's sett, / down into the earth/ to remind the grove/ to stay joined/ at the root, / to speak as one living thing." In poetry "equal to the horizon, / equal to the morning sun," Leavens puts us there at the center of things-circling with the hawk overhead, wandering with the cougar down through a streambed, or sunning our wings with the butterfly. A lyric work of interconnectedness between the human and the natural worlds, Leavens' poems burn like a fire, showing us the way in "that small matter/ of living/ at the center/ of the dark."-Peter Grandbois, author of Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years