Poetry

The Language of Crows

Winner of the Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award 2023, from Middle Creek Publishing

One of the most powerful relationships in our lives is with time, and in The Language of Crows, Lorrie Wolfe deftly offers us poetic lenses for seeing our lives in terms of days, months, seasons, years, “perennial youth” and “tree time.” Her poems help us touch what is most precious—solitude, language, love, kindness, a small brown songbird, our own fragile epiphanies, milkweed floss and the brief flutter of our lives—even as we learn to let it all go. A beautiful collection of free verse and form, humble and wildly true.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Author of All the Honey and Hush

From the opening poem, “Creation,” throughout this collection of poems, a singular vision of human life blossoms that derives from the poet’s love of nature and radiates like the psalms of Orpheus with the presence of people she loves. She loves like a hummingbird, “whirling feathers in a showy dive;” she notices the arrival of a first frost as “Egyptian gauze;” the splendor of fall aspens “spill their golden coins;” she follows mountain trails which are “highways for birds and small-footed animals;” indeed, the book is resplendent with bird song and earned wisdom and a special kind of reverence for life itself as in “A Seed’s Prayer.” Readers of this fine collection will be richly rewarded with the knowledge that nothing cherished is truly lost.

Bill Tremblay
Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University
Author of Walks Along the Ditch