A mountain Touched by Fire

In A Mountain Touched by Fire are poems tempered by meter and molded by boot tread—Mikel Vause offers the reader relics from what he witnesses on mountain climbs and desert coulees. In the tradition of the adventurer, Vause says “They're gone now / Mummery and Mallory / Shipton Shackleton Longstaff Thesinger… Their sextants, followed the planetary music / Of mythic constellations / To worlds undiscovered” Planetary music fills the mind as Vause explores scenes of ancient battlefields or a sunset made “Ominous/God's finger out from a cloud / Scratches a Death's Head / On concrete cooling towers.” Soul and spirit shape the experience in these poems. The adventurers are not all gone. We have Mikel Vause. Mary Elizabeth Gillilan, Editor-in-Chief, Clover, A Literary Rag Mikel Vause’s A Mountain Touched by Fire celebrates a life tuned to the wild and wandering the earth in search of it. He explores far mountain ranges and the wild tangles of memory, and the strange, nearly alien qualities of the natural world. These are poems which make a reader pensive as they settle into consciousness, and appreciative of the fine mind which has gathered and created them. Howard McCord, Author of The Man Who Walked to the Moon and other books Mikel Vause’s poetry is always good for a surprise. The poems in A Mountain Touched by Fire speak of adventure and the human need to explore, and they are adventurous in themselves. They map the ascent and descent of human success and failure, the trials and tribulations that have made our species what it is, often reflected in the meditations of a lyrical voice getting a foothold on experience. The poems embody what they say and challenge us to do: to go out on a limb, push the envelope, and look over the precipice into the existential abyss, and to assume the risk—and reward—comes with defining and overcoming new frontiers. From his local originals in Utah, the lyrical “I” describes concentric circles that extend from Ogden to Oslo, from Hooper to the Himalayas, and from the American West to the Tibetan North. Here is a voice as sure-footed as it is crafted. Michael Wutz, Author and Editor of Weber: The Contemporary West