Pine Barrens

“Beauty cuts us free from all anchors,” the narrator of “Beauty’s Arsenal” declares. Is such freedom a form of liberation, or despair? Braving such big questions, Michael Gushue’s collection ventures through halted and haunted moments in these powerful lyric poems. “Time has its hungers,” admits the opening of “Iron Plantations”—“Hundred of years.” In *Pine Barrens*, we might gaze on what will not grow in the sandy, acidic soil shaped by fire. Or perhaps we might find ourselves ready to look toward what ferociously thrives.” Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems When you enter the pages of Pine Barrens, you enter a world of contemplative poems that are so resonant in their detailed imagery and evocative rhythms of the natural world, they do what we want from poetry: they fasten our attentiveness to their subject and the poetry itself. “The ghosts of bog iron haunt these barrens, / the waters stained tea-dark with tannins,” Michael Gushue writes in “Iron Plantations,” and continues: “Green sands and marls condense to yellow-brown/ stone – porous, insoluble, buried ore - / in the muck of stream banks and shallow marsh / that mottle and vein the dense pine forest.” Each one of these haunting poems will not let you go. “Saint Sebastian, lodestone/ for arrows, has been my patron,” Gushue writes in “November’s Harness”: “I have spent my life in hope / that a word can pierce the heart.” Each one of these nineteen poems does.” Merrill Leffler, author of Mark the Music “*Pine Barrens* is a magnificent new level in Michael Gushue’s repertoire. Poetry has gifted us Gushue’s books with classicism, humor, pop culture and philosophy; now, *Pine Barrens* is different from all that came before—more an ethos than place— writing cultivated by a master gardener, with language pulled from hard soil so stunning you have to catch your breath. Gushue finds the rare; and then lyricism and lexicon to physicalize that. The book begins, ‘I have spent my life in hope that a word can pierce the heart;’ then every single page pierces ours.” Grace Cavalieri