Intense observations of the natural world imbue the poems of David Chorlton marrying vision to language. These poems raise semaphores of praise and warning. Their message: implicit. Their beauty: extraordinary. Using image and voice Chorlton infuses these pages with truths that we absorb through our skin as we read and in so doing he has created a book of real importance.

—Joan Colby, author of Her Heartsongs

David Chorlton's lush new book lives in the intersection of the created sphere of Eliot and Goethe, Schubert and Bach, and of the natural world of the jaguar and black witch moth. Musical and painterly language explores the hunger world / where wanting never ends, coupled with a deep concern for what we are losing and what we have lost. In this disquiet, Chorlton, along with Eliot, inhabits an ultimate resignation—Shantih shantih shantih.

—Catherine Hammond, poet and translator of We Are All Alive

I am always eager to read new books by David Chorlton. His latest collection, Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird, doesn't disappoint. Sometimes the poems are appropriately dark but not too gloomy. They remind us of what we've lost, but just as often stark images show us the beauty we still have, or might have again: (e.g., from "Flash Flood": the first raindrop / fell slowly to ground / where it slapped into the dust / and made a star). I was most struck by many poems that contrasted conflicts of nature and civilization, such as this passage from "El Amor Ecológico": as the ocelot also / is too beautiful / to be safe. The desert landscape of Arizona is often the poet's canvas, but the themes are universal and important for our times.

—Robert S. King, author of Developing a Photograph of God