Review of Time Under the Overlook Guy Reed/ Raphael Kosek
Bushwhack Books 2025 $20 82 pages
Although I consider myself a true lover of the natural world, I have always been bored to death by poems that are just about a squirrel, a tree, the flowers and fields. I think the very best poets who write of the beauties, terrors, and mysteries of nature also plant their very human selves in those poems, as does Guy Reed who tells us “I take my poems from the mountain’s shadow / I leave my flesh in return.” These are poems of place by someone who is living and breathing and existing in this special place over a long period of time, who is as much a part of it as the creatures, the weather, the moods and ghosts that pass through and under “the overlook.”
In “Lesson,” the speaker’s reaction to the food chain delights with Darwinian humor: while watching an ant heroically hauling a much larger spider across the driveway only to be snapped up by a chicken—he instinctively stops and looks “behind” him up at the sky. He knows we are subject to the same laws. In “Owls are the Monkeys of the North,” a metaphysical door is opened:
Heard the voices
but thought it was chatter . . .
Once in a while I still hear my name
shouted from the in-between.
I don’t know who is speaking
so near my ear and calling from a great distance.
In “Overlook,” he declares, “There is / no way to know what bestows grace / where or when.” And his acknowledgement of another world that dips in and out of this one cannot be ignored. In a favorite poem, “I Am March,” the speaker tells us, “Between death and birth / no age relevant on Earth / the in-between / the was and almost.” Or in “Seeing”: “From the stoop I see a white wolf / staring at me from the wood’s edge,” but by morning, he “[sees] the wolf has become snow / packed into the crotch of a tree.” These are poems by someone invested in seeing and feeling everything “under the overlook” in articulate poems, running the gamut from funny to deeply philosophical—a world inhabited by someone who loves and believes in the world around him. And his metaphors—howlingly gorgeous and spot on as in “The stars, small crustaceans / that must bury themselves / until the tide of night returns.”
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Guy Reed won the 2022 Littoral Press poetry prize and is author of Second Innocence (Luchador Press), The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press), and co-author, with Cheryl A. Rice, of Until The Words Came (Post Traumatic Press). His poems and essays have been published in journals both online and in print. He’s a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. From Minnesota, Guy now resides in the Catskills Mountains. <guyedwinreed.com>
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Reviewer Raphael Kosek’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry East, Catamaran, and many other journals. Her chapbook, Rough Grace, won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Prize. She won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review’s poetry contest and Eastern Iowa Review’s 2016 nonfiction prize. American Mythology was recently released from Brick Road Poetry Press. She teaches English at Marist College where her students keep her real. She is the 2019-2020 Dutchess County Poet Laureate.
Lightwood 
a beautiful book indeed!
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