Scrying stone

Steven O'Brien’s poetry, like the geology of his imaginative landscapes, is shot through with the vital ores of language. Whether writing of nature, war, love, mortality or our new world of terror and counterterror, O’Brien’s poems are striking for their glowing, elemental quality where delicacy of expression is contrasted with stark metaphor. As always with a poetry struggling to understand its world, the past is an insistent force and the dead stand at the margins of vision, a chorus to the ebb and flow of present realities. It is also a poetry at home with the contemporary world and its transient ironies. Above all, Scrying Stone tingles with the joy of words, how they contain the mythic and the magical to inform, infuse and transform the mundane. It is a true poetry.