Season of Harvest

In Season of Harvest, Linda Blaskey and jim bourey have made a long exchange of poems into a consoling meditation on aging. These are not cast in that popular form, poems as letters, but as free-standing poems of vividly described and deeply felt acceptance. As one of bourey's poems says, in order to come to terms "with finality," he first had to find the overgrown path back to a childhood memory, while in her last poem Blaskey stands "mouth agape," filled, not just with sky, but "with the letting go / of what must leave." At this book's end, though, they sing a marvelous "Duet," which I leave it to the reader to find.

Roger Mitchell, author of Reason's Dream (Dos Madres)



The poems in Season of Harvest encompass a love for the natural world from the perspectives of farm and wilderness with wisdom, awe and beauty that never need to reach for hyperbole. In this volume there are poems about enduring love that does not need to be romanticized, poems like a well-banked fire. Keep this book by your bedside, so that if you wake in the middle of the night, you can read a few and feel the presence of compassion and joy for the whole life cycle, of which we are all a part.

Ruth Weinstein, author of Back to the Land



Linda Blaskey and jim bourey, two highly accomplished old-friend poets, have collaborated in this luminous collection of observations back and forth over years and miles and it makes for very fine reading. Their respect for one another, all they've weathered, and the words they choose to describe it all, are powerful. As Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison note in their collaboration Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, "Only today / I heard / the river / within the river." Blaskey and bourey hear the river within the river and they tell us some of its secrets in Season of Harvest.

--Guinotte Wise, author Horses See Ghosts