The Owl in the Woodwork by Ron Domen

The poems in Ron Domen‘s “The Owl in the Woodwork” are, quite simply, lovely.  His poems capture our real world in language that is sensuous and offered in just-right rhythms―his lines are melodic, with internal rhymes and a cadence reminiscent of the poems of another physician-poet, William Carlos Williams. In this chapbook, Domen gives us beautifully “Plaintive Music,” right-on imagery, and touches of mystery that both intrigue and satisfy.   A collection to be read, and reread many times.

—Cortney Davis

Ron Domen’s The Owl in the Woodwork begins with poems in homage to the watercolorist Charles Burchfield and thus prepares us for the riches the book will unfold to us: a natural world as richly illuminated as any of Burchfield’s art. Domen accomplishes with words what his woodworking father did with varnish: restoring the world for us in all its pure and marvelous/and ordinary self till we inhale theclean/smell of woodsmoke that comes/out of nowhere from an unknown/hearth on a winter day. We need poetry that speaks to our senses with a language so right and so resonant we could be reading Thoreau, we could be gazing into a Charles Burchfield painting, we could be running our hand over oak rubbed back to a luster. Open to any page in The Owl in the Woodwork and you have your faith renewed in the power of poetry to do justice to this world – itsradioactive leopard frogs, thoselambent fugitives; its pungent smells of kerosene lamps; its clusters of yarrow and hepatica, its sycamore and cherry; itscold November rain/studded with flurries; its fog thatfinally lugs/ itself from the meadow. This is a book you will not want just to read, but to savor, to read again and again.

—Christopher Bursk

These are intellectual love poems – love for the planet, for human beings, for deep learning, and for understanding the earthy history of people and things. Affection resides here for the small details that will draw the reader from the personal to an expanding universe. The words sing of cells of human skin and heart, and cells of wood, plants, animals, frogs, and owls. Science and art are in harmony in this collection. If a poem falls unobserved, has a sound been made?  Read the poems aloud or in silence, read them in the forest or in a library; lovely earth sounds abound!

—Judy Schaefer