To be inside a David Axelrod poem is to be in a natural world both numinous and unrelentingly physical. His concise, musical language is full of discoveries within which one finds the inner life and the world of seasons, creatures, and things in powerful, meditative interaction that places the poet firmly in the tradition of Roethke and Richard Hugo. But in Years Beyond the River he is also blazing his own unique trail. A splendid book; take it with you into the wild. -Christopher Howell, The Grief of a Happy Life In the exquisite naturally charged poems of David Axelrod's seventh collection, Years Beyond the River, an encounter with thorn or wildflower is new life, the rotted heartwood of fir becomes memory, and the delicate brush of a bat wing upon the skin echoes the beloved walking through the dark. Fire-haunted and fire-hunted we exist in a oneness with all things beckoning both death and life. What we know of the soul crosses the span of "Orion's spiral arm" and remembers what it means to be wilderness. There is abundance and loss among the terrible singular notion of rivers and trees passing away.

There is beauty, grace, and strength interwoven with the scent of sage in our clothes as we breathe and dream and love. -Shann Ray, Atomic Theory 7.