Many thanks to Tom Zimmerman at The Big Windows Review for his review of Bone Antler Stone. I’ve pasted an excerpt below, and you can read the entire review here. Excerpts and reviews from the book are here.
“… [Bone Antler Stone] is an act of powerful sympathetic imagination that forges a connection between lost cultures and our own and that reminds us of our commonality as a species…. The poems themselves are mostly short, unrhymed, and as sturdily built as their subject matter. The tone is reverent and full of awe for the people, their artifacts, and the landscape itself…. throughout the book, there is a marked awareness of art’s magic, strangeness, and immortality. Many of the people in the poems live (and die) as outsider artists within their cultures: the “hobble-headed,” lame-footed smith in “Song to the Smith”; “The Seeress of Vix,” with her “crooked look” and “knobbled walk”; and, among the “Bog Bodies,” the Haraldskaer Woman (“They didn’t dare to cut my hair / and I was thrown in alive under their envy”), the Kayhausen Boy (“But my bog dreams amid all that dead matter / were to me a song I will never leave”), and the Grauballe Man (“perhaps special, perhaps a source of shame / perhaps feared and gifted in my defect”), to name a few. Fittingly, in the book’s final poem, “The Wanderer II (Flight from Orkney),” the poet, using Pytheas as his mouthpiece, envisions his own work as a continuation of art’s regenerative power.”
