What they are saying about the OxBow Poems by James Burbank…

 

Burbank wields the oxbow as a potent symbol of “the ever-shrinking, ever-disappearing world we call Nature”; it also provides a rich metaphorical frame-work for his Zen-like poems…With passionate artistry, Burbank delivers his urgent warning: “bend the river to our will and…we rue the consequences.” A creative tribute to a fragile ecosystem.

--Kirkus Reviews

 

In the OxBow Poems James Burbank gives us many gifts in one: the slowing of time, the perfection of place, words and images that do not illustrate one another but stand, each close up fragment on its own, urging us to pay attention to the single breath, the aimless encounter, the now of life. This is a gem of a book. I am in awe of its simple grandeur.

--Margaret Randall   

 

James Burbank’s…photographic and poetic meditations on the Rio Grande Bosque and the Duranes Lateral are so intimate and present that the reader becomes a seer, and the trees, waterways, flowers , cranes, and grasses are the revelation. Expansive yet spare, The OxBow Poems know “whose skin is river skin.” The Rio Grande and its creatures deserve poems and visions as perfect and beautiful as these.

--V.B. Price