Deirde Kessler's poems speak vividly, gently, and passionately to those who are nourished or in need of replenishment, by the natural world. She writes with both the precise eyes of a Darwin and the treasuring eyes of an Audubon or Georgia O'Keeffe. Even more, Kessler's landscapes, whether in Oregon, the American southwest, Tasmania, or Prince Edward Island, are vibrantly inhabited by the presence and traces of ancestors- aboriginal peopels, pioneers, myth-makers, and of the settlers and wayfarers of our own time, those who preserve and honour, and those who devour and destroy. Her poems known childhood and family; sibling love and worry, parents' bittersweet gifts to their children- the sinews that hold families together through distance, aging, and death.