Abandoned Earth: poems

"I love the clarity and precision of Linwood Rumney’s poems and his restrained yet intense voice. Intense because it is restrained, pressurized by his deft use of stanzaic structures and forms. Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams seem to be among his influences, but his voice and vision are clearly his own. Rumney writes about the natural world and the human world, and he sees in both of them a terrible 'excess' and a brutal 'lack'. But, as in 'A Mystery on the Greyhound Bus', he also recognizes that 'simple beauty persists', like the finch feeding her chicks in a bus station eave while a man on the platform, both laughing and crying, waves to a woman on the departing bus. Far more than simple beauty, that image—and Rumney’s poetry throughout this book—is resonant and complex in the most compelling way."--Eric Nelson, judge and author of "Some Wonder: poems"