The title of Allan Peterson’s seventh full-length book, Amid This, vividly describes the astonishments of being alive and surrounded by a world in which there is no ordinary. Nature intersects thought and language in surprising and revealing observations. The fact that life has term limits invests everything with poignancy. Using illuminating language, poems often arise from the physics of perception. Whether domestic, ecological, or galactic, the poems are like being spoken to privately in a thoughtful voice.
The poems follow multiple intuitive leads, combining evocative language with equally evocative observations, discovering ideas of order as easily as putting a glove on the wrong hand. “Wisteria close to hysteria in its gorgeous profusion” (from the poem Realization). For the reader, there is a full immersion in a poem’s clear delivery. As the poems speak among themselves the reader participates in the reflections of a curious mind. With influences from the Florida Gulf Coast to the mountains of Oregon, landscape and its creature inhabitants, each with its own expressive power, are always primary advisors, not just metaphors, but participants. These are the celebratory insights of a natural philosopher with a parallel life as a visual artist.