Customer Reviews

Quarry

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A friend recommended this book and I have been carrying it with me for the past couple of weeks, dipping in, savoring these exquisite poems. I get from them a kind of sustenance I get from so little contemporary poetry.

The "quarry" of Guinzio's title is multifarious, ever shifting: the "geologic face" where "workable rock" is mined, the list of species birders "hunt," the unseen or unnoticed, "what resides in the deepest grass." In a larger sense, though, Guinzio's quarry, it seems to me, is something grander, more ineffable: the thing "we're too close to see," what we miss because we aren't looking for it--in essence, the very subject and substance of poetry.

These poems are dense and airy, classical and contemporary, mysterious and perfectly clear. They are, in the end, the record of a life lived and of an alert and and generous spirit moving through the world that asks us again and again to "stop what you're doing and look." Buy this book. To read it is to come into contact with the unaltering and unalterable power of poetry.