The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana, Paperback

This book you�re holding represents years� worth of discipline and labor, of time and travel and, as you�ll discover, the pure joy of attention and love of language. The thing that makes a poet undertake a particular project is a mystery, finally. One day Shari Wagner was called to understand something, and the journey she decided to take was a meditative one, through the labyrinth of nature and time in a particular place in this world. The result is a gift, this collection of poems. I don�t know of a writer, with the exceptions of Gene Stratton-Porter (the subject of several of these poems) or Jessamyn West, who has written with as much care and specificity of Indiana�s natural beauty as Wagner does in this book. When Wagner sees an oriole at 10 o�clock in a tree she writes that �it�s like opening / the tab on an advent calendar.� I can�t think of a better description of the experience of reading these poems. Susan Neville

Author of Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land