Description
This book is largely about change. Change in the natural world as we observe the daily happenings from sunrise to sunset, as we move through the cycles of nature, especially the seasons, from the mostly drab colors of winter to the glorious riot of color that sets the woods ablaze in autumn. And also change as it relates to creatures like birds and animals in the world around us. The book is also about change with people, their attitudes and emotions, their response to the stages of life, to the challenges and conditions that beset most of us as we journey through life, and watch others as they journey, whether through school or illnesses or other impactful events, as we move inexorably to the ultimate change in death.
Praise for Taste of Change
Like the heron, Wes Sims has honed his patience, giving us with these poems about the mountains and the lakes, their birds and their people. Each poem in Taste of Change reads like a prayer, like the deepest of meditations, or like “secret whispers of star-struck lovers.”
—Denton Loving,
author of Crimes Against Birds
Wes Sims communicates with the natural world in an intimate, loving way, using a familiar tone. “Letter to the Ocean” offers one elegant example of poetry as correspondence with the earth. A poet like this will never be alone. And a reader, luckily, will also have the fine company of this spiritual guide in generous lines and crisp rhythms. Poetry here offers a powerful consolation.
—Marilyn Kallet,
author of How Our Bodies Learned
“A pair of common house sparrows” proclaiming “their trust in the future” to battling king snake and copperhead to man scanning across generations proclaiming memories and mortality, each poem in Taste of Change, a chapbook by Wes Sims, works like a striking documentary photograph. These poems record the change of seasons and shift of shadows, both of earth and the body. Beautiful images, dodged and burned, give us a potent and compelling contrast, record an alluring feast of struggle and sustenance.
—Darnell Arnoult,
author of Galaxie Wagon
