With her lush exploration of the natural world, D. Walsh Gilbert magnifies small moments and wee creatures into epiphanies of all kinds in Bleat & Prattle. No creature is too small to be the hero of a story, or a myth. Whether as metaphor or anthropomorphic investigation, she inhabits the animals and flowers she describes, as in "I long to be a wasp, to communicate by stinger," in the poem "Resolution." Like the great Irish poets Patrick Kavanagh and Eamon Grennan, for Walsh (a dual citizen) the texture of sound in a poem is all-important. In "The Little Hills of Monaghan," we find the lines, "This, the same scurf smell/ scuffed from the drumlins/ of Kavanagh's/ Inniskeen Road/ as he walked." Her Irish poems will transport any reader right to the old country. One of my favorite poems in this collection is "The Time of Balance," a study of a northern cardinal during a thunderstorm. Clinging to a holly bough, the cardinal exhibits "the stiff refusal of a small thing/ who tastes winter's vaulted wind on his beak// and still opens his mouth. He swallows/ the tempest." This fine collection takes you by the hand and leads you directly into the wonders of the living world. -Steve Straight author of Affirmation winner of the William Meredith Award in Poetry