Blue Crow

This is a versatile and exciting poet. As Robert Sward writes on the back of the book: "Michael Spring's poetry is wonderfully original, versatile, energetic, and innovative. He has a strong lyrical gift." From Kafkaesque poems about cockroaches to sensual, artistic poems about the natural world and erotica. This is the total package. Full of passion, deep image and deep song; some of the poems remind me of Lorca's surrealistic yet simplistic approach - sensitive and highly accessible and highly original. He has a strong lyrical gift. What's great about this book is, as Ruth Daigon says, "Michael Spring's use of figurative language makes his work easily accessible and masks a gentle sharp-edged wit..."or what Pam Bernard says: "Meaning rises from this speaker's experience and his relationship to his material. Embodying scope and intimacy, this is an original, potent voice, full of music and lyrical imagination. A fine and welcome first book."(all quotes are from blurbs taken from the back cover of Michael Spring's blue crow)

from the Pedestal Magazine, by Terri Brown-Davidson: There's a Zen consciousness that pervades Michael Spring's poetry collection blue crow , a meditative stillness that cracks itself open and reveals itself as a series of internal dialogues throughout the four sections of the book: dialogues between self and self, self and lover, self and the world. In this unassuming quiet, there's a host of poetic effects so artfully disguised that the reader might forget that she's reading poetry. Yet, if Spring's isn't a poetry of virtuosity or bombast or ballast, it is work capable of vaulting the reader up to a new consciousness of the self as a whole: intact, restored, and--as old-fashioned as it sounds--beautiful. In this final word might be located the raison d'etre for our celebration of Spring's work. For he can reveal the extraordinary in the "ordinary" with the strongest of the conversational poets, yet there's a music in Spring's work that's often lacking in Ted Kooser's or--to seek a more distant antecedent--Richard Hugo's. All of the adjectives (including "beautiful") that we might use to describe Spring's work are strangely old-fashioned. And yet, it's perhaps we--and not Spring's poetry--that are anachronistic for allowing these words to slip so subtly out of usage and, finally, consciousness: "integrity," "substance," "soulfulness." For Spring's poetry is no amalgamation of fluff and effects, of sharp-tongued witticism and fashionably throw-away lines. Nor is it work guaranteed to probe and scour the darkest and rankest-tasting reaches of a confessionalism that celebrates, in occasionally strained though often powerful ways, the grit and effluvia of a mind yoked, conjoined twin-like to a body. This is poetry so near-silent that it has to whisper in one's ear for minutes before one attends to the deft though subdued lyricism that sings of ordinary subjects, yet in such astonishingly original ways that one is forced, finally, to listen.This is poetry that's guaranteed not to desert you in the darkest hours of the night, so haunting is it--and it's poetry that's guaranteed, depending upon the individual piece, to wake the reader either sweat-soaked or intensely comforted. Odd as it sounds, I found comfort in the permanence of the vermin Spring so lovingly evokes. Spring's cockroaches are the response to Gregor Samsa's call, offering us the knowledge that even the lowliest among us can leave an imprint upon this world, and, by doing so, inevitably shadow the next. However, Spring's poems are just as likely to leave the reader sweat-soaked as comforted. In this respect, their looming silences can become veritable shouts of societal or existential discomfort. Spring's blue crow is so beautiful that it would be a mistake to miss it. More importantly, though, in an age of essentially insubstantial poetry, Spring's work nourishes the soul.