Composting

"Let your lips be stained / with truth, your whitest shirt be ruined" exhorts the speaker of a poem in Mid Walsh's Composting. To engage with these trenchant poems, which articulate the concrete work of repair and renewal, the abstract work of forgiveness and self-evaluation, is to face the heat of "a furnace at the heart / that burns and sighs and knows no reward / other than to be a flame." The poems manifest what healing grace can emerge from hands, callused or smeared with dirt and grease, as they ply oars to bridle the current or adjust a "deadman" to fasten down the worktable upheavals of the world.

-Tom Daley, author, Far Cry

These poems are dialogues of doing and being, intense labor and quiet witness, and pleasure in connection and solitude. Care in every activity - pounding with a sledge hammer, raking leaves, walking a forest path - is celebrated in poems of consummate craftsmanship for shifting tones, musical lines, and fresh images. Using poetic tools as varied as these, Walsh, himself a carpenter, can draw from his toolbox. The poems in Composting heighten our awareness and appreciation of, as Walsh writes, "the kiss of living," even when living "sprout[s] strange fears" and loss.

-Merryn Rutledge, EdD, author, Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed

Mid Walsh's Composting is a book that turns the work of living into revelation. Like Frost walking along stone walls, Walsh tends the suburbs, backwoods, and shoreline with exacting, ecological ache and reverent attention. His poems remind us that "whatever is, was other first," and that the ordinary labor of hauling "broken ties and weeds away / into the woods," or feeling "the weight of what's fallen" pull the body backward, leads us into a deeper reckoning of repair and grace. This transformative debut book of poems shows how tending the world teaches us to tend ourselves.

-Ed Gaudet, hi-tech entrepreneur and published poet