Review of "Altitude Poems and Stories" by Craig Brandis

Surprise! "Altitude Poems and Stories" by Craig Brandis was just published; a slick covered chap book with some marvelous images. Though slightly melancholy, the poems are filled with surprising images. I didn't know Brandis could write this well. Some poems seemed to be lifted from masters, themselves.

In Mount St. Helens, he writes of the mountain while camping out under a "diamond hard sky" or climbing "its scabrous slopes into the brilliant, orange-white morning."

In "The Wandering Mind" Brandis writes:

"Tender is
the fleet of electric birds
bluing the trees
in their sockets,
wiring the
world with
song-"

In "The Daily News" a beach house keeps watch with "brindled eyes" and the sea is "just wave on wave, like a furrowed brow." "Some days birds skim the rollers/ like penitents walking the breadth/ of a watery country"

Finally, "Red Tail" gives us this great image:

a red tailed hawk hunts
oceans of air-feathering
oars before the kill

Well done Craig Brandis! Keep writing poems

ESBN 978-1-304-71809-9