Peace in Exile

This first collection of David Oates' poems of 1992 followed his Earth Rising: Ecological belief in an age of Science. A naturalist and backpacker describes his feeling of alienation in the Los Angeles metropolis where "The roar of images and sounds impounds us/like ancient city walls--keeping out the world, keeping in beloved mayhem, barter, /smells, deceit and favor"-- yet someone, rooftop, brings water for her son. Oates leaves LA to hike through chapparal, canyon, desert, along the Kern River and into the mountains of King's Canyon in the mid Californian Sierras. There is irony in "The Dow is down...The tao is down slightly..." and "What the chainsaws have made clear" in the last short "Lo-Ku" poems.