Life in the OrdovicianLife in the Ordovician

Poetry. "These are poems of great courtesy, of hospitality: they invite us in. We find ourselves in a world where the natural surround yields almost imperceptibly to the precincts of the householder, and vice versa. The gardener, the naturalist, the quiet but acute observer of the local flora and fauna, intimate with what lives and grows within a few hundred feet of his door, returns in these poems to the mythic realm that has always belonged to him by right. And just as the line between the natural and the domestic gracefully wavers here, so too does the border between mythic truth and immediate observation."--Norman Finkelstein

"Like Forrest Gander and James Merrill, Robert Murphy writes in [on?] the interface of the distant past and the far future. This is a threshold poetry--extending infinite possibilities from a stable, cosmic center."--Paul Bray