SNIPPETS AND BLURBS
SIMILITUDE
"Grant Hier's poetry speaks the truth. Grant Hier is Mozart, Jackson Pollack, and Gary Snyder all at once. Hier's work moves. He's the best poet working today." — John Brantingham | Poet Laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks
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"Hier’s deceptively accessible collection brings us a memorable mingling of nature, bodies, and the human spirit. On every page, the reader nods along to the poetry’s music and to the private rhythm of their own recognition." — Genevieve Scott | author of Catch My Drift
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"Grant Hier is a poet who looks for the cosmic in the everyday, the nebula in the coffee cup, and in Similitude he finds it. A radiant exploration of the thingness of the world. I really love this book." — Rufi Thorpe | Girls From Corona Del Mar; Dear Fang, With Love; Violin Face
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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
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"Grant Hier's writing is about surrender. Surrender to the word, allowing it to live, to lead, to guide. Mr. Hier masterly documents that journey." — Louie Pérez | Los Lobos songwriter, guitarist, percussionist, singer; painter, illustrator, sculptor, designer; author of Good Morning, Aztlán
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"The book is full of intelligent humor and word play. Hier pulls from mathematics, physics, music, the natural world in all of its manifestations, and from the mysteries of the human heart to create a poetry of wonder. — Donna Hilbert | author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and essays
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Grant Hier’s work is artistry, introspection, and music." — John Brantingham | author of more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction
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UNTENDED GARDEN
"The rhythms are exquisite... it takes your breath away (it did mine).... Hier recalls fellow Californian poet Robinson Jeffers, particularly Jeffers’ posthumously published The Beginning and the End (Hier is a Jeffers’ scholar). Hier also shares with Jeffers the theme of (ideal) human connectedness to the natural world and its inheritance." — The Rumpus
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"This is a poetry that honors the mystery and beauty of daily life and sanctifies the ground on which we live." — Donna Hilbert | Gravity: New & Selected Poems
"Untended Garden allowed me to re-see the world that’s been in front of me my whole life. That’s the beauty of a collection like his. It moves us beyond the everyday and the common. It returns the extraordinary in our lives that we’ve become blind to." — The East Jasmine Review
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"Untended Garden by Grant Hier is a questing meditation, a searching in language and experience for a sense of self in place and time, a journey through the long history of inheritance in body and song , a definition of beginning, a recognition of finality. Questions abound within the poetry. "Could it be that all is present, that everywhere / is contained in where we are?" Contemplation is a hallmark and a pleasure in this book." — Pattiann Rogers | author of numerous poetry books; winner of dozens of poetry prizes and fellowships
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"A recommended read for fans of thinking poetry." — Michael Stephan Oates | Wade In The Water: A novel of the great Johnstown flood; The Stones in the Field
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"This is a 'Song of Myself' epic , written over the course of twenty years, and similarly ambitious. It sets its scope from the Big Bang to now, containing multitudes, one might say. It is for the ages, both past and future. A deep, penetrating, scintillating, readable exploration of personal, familial, and communal history. The first time I read this poem, I knew it was destined to become precisely such a comprehensive, prestigious, ground-breaking, major publication as Untended Garden. Here is a poet of high standing, with a superior control of language, observational awareness, willingness to probe one’s own depths, a mastery of both traditional and innovative forms, and a first-rate intellectual acuity." — Gerald Locklin | author of more than 100 volumes of poetry, fiction, and literary essays
"Grant Hier’s Untended Garden is a poem that should be chanted by firelight at the entrance to a cave. It is a journey of self-discovery, shifting back and forth in time, propelled by rhythms of creation and sensations of the natural world. It is a well-wrought psychic quest for a life rooted in the contemporary while still in ancient sympathy with the earth. Read this book; then join me in saying, 'Bravo!'" — Charles Harper Webb | author of numerous poetry books; winner of dozens of poetry prizes and fellowships