Nowhere All at Once

Grace Bauer's poems in Nowhere All At Once do everything all at once and quite successfully -- mixing a tender sense of human and worldly presence with a lush instinct for sound, a compact flow of narrative, the perfect weight of wry humor, and an acutely attentive vigilance to all surroundings... Bauer's balancing perspectives help "illuminate a greater regard" about everything mysterious and wondrous we are living."     Naomi Shihab NyeIt's against drabness that Bauer powerfully writes. Her casually precise poems -- all motion and meditation, praise and agitation -- do the double work of looking outward to transform the inner life, and looking inward to remind us of the superb texture of the world."     Daisy FriedThe poems in Nowhere All At Once are seductively plainspoken and deceptively complex. Throughout, Grace Bauer celebrates the power of poetry to transform our sense of the world -- to help us understand the qualities of mortality, love, human frailty, and the divine. There is an intricate mind at work in these poems, and Grace Bauer is a poet of true intuition and depth.     Kevin Prufer