Ralph Stevens' poems of quiet observation draw on life's diurnal rhythms. They take in scenes like breaths and when we see as his eyes do, we follow in his poetic acts of sentience. These poems of later life crackle in the stillness of an inner work, still in order to receive what the trees speak. They wait for the field to come inside, listen for imagined voices "hopeful as Hardy's thrush" with the hope that it is always good to receive the world...