Gary Margolis's poems in Fire in the Orchard are haunting, many-surfaced, and disturbing. The light in them catches and turns; they are like hammered silver. There is much lyric beauty here, some humor, considerable pain. Masterfully crafted, complex, the poems insinuate themselves into your consciousness. In "Any Quiet That Was Left," the persona is burning branches below an elm and the whole poem is a question. The poem ends with a stunning image "...each bird a feather in that black wing/that, turning, turned the sky into smoke?"

In one of my favorite poems, the quiet horror at the memory of a father killing pigeons takes a turn to a deeper horror of family members being shipped in boxcars to the fate that is implicit in the imagery.

Another compelling poem is the powerful, energetic tribute to Michael Jordan. I've gone back to these poems again and again, trying to explain just what it is that holds me. I've concluded it's Margolis's craft, a masterful ability to explore the tension of liquidity and steel.

Gary Margolis is alive to the inner as well as the outer world. He doesn't write just as a father, or a teacher, or a husband, or a concerned member of his generation and rural community, but as all of these, and his subjects range from the intimacies of the bedroom and the dance floor to those of the garden, the gym, and the artist's notebook. The natural world, if not front and center, is never far from these poems; but I would not call Margolis a "nature poet" for the simple reason that there's too much humanity here. This is clearly the work of someone who has moved through the world with his eyes, ears, and arms open.