When Is a Burning Tree

In Christina Seymour’s splendid, delicate collection she uses images from paintings and natural landscapes to describe her own vivid interior life. The speaker of these poems tells us: “Any living thing is as good as a Renoir”; she knows “There’s only so much preparing / for the flood of acorns, their soft meat / crumbled in piles on the sidewalk”; she opens “a small attic window for truth.” Seymour’s poems are quiet, precise, and powerful.

—Faith Shearin, author of The Owl Questionand Darwin’s Daughter