The Land Has Its Say

Poetry. This collection of seventy poems moves through the physical and metaphysical vastness of desert canyons toward the memory of the small New England farm where the author spent his childhood, follows the author's wanderings during the sixties, reflects on alienation and human cruelty, global warming and war, then offers a kind of synthesis in which the end connects with the beginning. Of the collection as a whole, poet John Freeman writes: "Each poem and each section is a discrete entity but all fit together into a single meditation; we commune with the depth of a pebble, the extensiveness of the globe and the whole inheritance of our forebears back to the earliest humans and earlier still." On the style, novelist Jeffrey Lent comments: "Henry Lyman writes a clear uncluttered line, free of the self- conscious poetics so common today, lines that shape their meaning as the body of the poem tightens and the wonder of its story reveals itself." And poet Baron Wormser notes: "The poems are so natural, so acute, so fluent, so at home with themselves, so deeply inhabited."