“Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs—I aam, I aam—and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches “a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo” to Hart island in NY with its “unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins” to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place “where love isn’t fear,” these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it:  “You can tell we’re humans / by our short-billed caps.”  A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the “gentle lure” of these necessary and enduring poems.”

--Michael Waters