Chatter in the Canopy: Poems by Jeff Roberts

Jeff Roberts’s poems know physics and landscapes. They know too how those things are inextricably connected—the large and the small; and whether we’re aware of this in our day-to-day lives or not, Mr. Roberts’s poems are. A poem that knows something we don’t —or one that reminds us of what we’ve always known but have forgotten—is the poem that connects or reconnects us with how we understand ourselves in the world, at times as participants and at others times as witnesses. Roberts give us both of these perspectives and does so without editorial comment about which is the more rewarding or beneficial. Roberts’s poems bring us to a place where we remember and might reclaim the kind of experience that both aches and heals at once—the thing we come to poems for, in the end . . . a lost wisdom that poetry more than anything else tries to give back to us. —Paul Haenel Farewell, Goodbye, Wave Goodbye Washington Writers’ Publishing House