Helen Wickes

Dowser's Apprentice Helen Wickes

Dowser's Apprentice takes us directly yet deeply into daily life with news of canyon and desert, crop dust, and snow. "Hurry up and break / into life" the poems say. They steady themselves in the sky ("It's a night of fat, bright planets"), look up to the sun and stars ("The Milky Way above us - / that's our shadow river"), and move across the land, from rural California to the "undulant, green Pyrenees," to make a cosmology that we can all share. - Joyce Jenkins, editor of Poetry Flash