Newell writes about the natural world with a deep, listening spirit.

From Rwanda to Estonia, Abu Dhabi, to Amman, to La Paz and beyond, the poems in Michael L. Newell’s newest book, Wandering, span the world, its gritty aspects, as well as the sublime. Infused with a deep appreciation for life in its myriad incarnations, the poems in this book draw from time’s well across a span of fifty years, demonstrating wide interconnections of people and place.

Newell writes about the natural world with a deep, listening spirit. In “Fiddle,” a violin remembers the forest’s wind, and in “Spring Arrives,” feet sprout roots. Newell’s descriptions of landscape in poems such as “My Parents Phone Me Overseas,” “Annunciation,” and “Postcards from Abu Dhabi,” vividly reveal landscape, carrying readers directly into a felt world. In his poem, “Epiphany,” Newell depicts so well the awe the Andes’ “sprawling chains” engender that at the end of the poem when he describes the “throat fills with sound which predates man,” I, too, was carried into an attitude of deep wonder.

A number of poems in this volume are alive with connections to music, such as “Coleman Hawkins jamming with the wind and leaves,” at the park, but the poems also carry readers into difficult places—places of abandoned lots, clubbed fish, of memories where friends have disappeared and loves have been lost. As Newell writes in “Wandering Through Memory’s Back Alley,” “Live enough places and nowhere / is home but everywhere / one meets people / who live for decades / in the heart.” And Newell’s heart for humanity and the human experience is large. His poems greet despair in a variety of forms, examining it openly for what it is. As he states in “Where Do a Poet’s Words Come From,” hope and despair are twins intertwined. Newell holds them both with a deep and open heart. The poems in Wandering encompass despair with hope and are a rich well of life. “Every living minute must be felt and celebrated,” writes Newell, in “Wild I Am Shouted the Old Man,” and indeed, this volume of poems, encourages readers to do just that.