Small Fish in High Branches

Without its "hue and profusion," Annette Sisson reminds us, "the world is an orphan." And often these poems seek to clothe some austere loneliness in the multiplicity of life's visions and illusions. There are dramas of the natural landscape and still lives of urban isolation. Like all good poetry, Sisson's shows that everything that matters, whether tragic, as in her poem "Eclipse," or buoyant, as in her poem "Résistance," takes place on earth, in our world. This book is a loving celebration of the connections and tensions that help us to live our lives.

Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry and Dailiness