Woodsmoke, Wind, and the Peregrine
Poems
by Shaun Griffin

“The lovely and loving reverie of a man raptly engaged with his external world, these poems of wing and song and flight cross the invisible boundary between reality and dreamscape.  They waft into the realm of interior being and bring us to that still point where we peer into the quiet reflecting pool of self-knowledge, grace, and beauty.” —David Lee, author of So Quietly the Earth and A Legacy of Shadows.


“A father, a watcher, a seeker, a poet, a story-teller, Shaun Griffin is all these things in Woodsmoke, Wind, and the Peregrine. Whether haunted by the memory of a boyhood killing of a hummingbird (“You teach me to forgive the scar//we leave on land with wings”) or thinking of a dead friend’s feeder (“goldfinches whiskered in thistle”), Shaun Griffin’s words, like the birds he writes of, soar, pluck, dive, call, carry, capture, and build.

From the mountains of Nevada to the villages of Chile, Shaun Griffin sees one sky, filled with birds and memories—the wings of then and now giving us flight for all time. He gives us, as he calls it, “the scripture we chant to survive.”

This is a wild and beautiful book, and not just for poetry lovers, but for anyone who loves the birds we watch.”—Christopher Cokinos, author of Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds.

 

Shaun T. Griffin is the author of four books of poetry, including Bathing in the River of Ashes (University of Nevada Press, 1999), Snowmelt (Black Rock Press, 1994), and has edited two literature anthologies. He is the director of Community Chest, a non-profit social justice agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada. He lives in Virginia City, Nevada.