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Judy Kaber is a poet of luminous freshness and originality. There is sweat and jingling in these lines; surprises and leaps of language abound. She takes us from Los Altos to Mendocino to chainsaws to Bangor to a Belfast chicken processing plant to a snapping turtle nest. I love her line: “that morning after the divorce, she strikes / the match against her naked iron thigh.” You glow as you read her, your appetite whetted for the next image, the next metaphor. In “Once,” she has a line that keeps expanding for me: “the long noose / of evening.” There is heft in these poems: a keen eye and constant surprise.

Thomas R. Moore, Belfast Poet Laureate 2017, 2018

Judy Kaber’s Landscape with Rocks, Sky, Nails is a deeply ethical book of poetry: poems that keep house, where house is not only human habitations but the entire ecosphere the poet inhabits, including animals, forests, roads, and factories. With tactility and objectivity, the poems evoke the ache of embodied existence. A tender stoicism holds solid and fierce as we travel this landscape of tang and breathe its scents of Maine wilderness, roadside creatures, human striving and loss. The landscape draws the reader to the intimate interior-taking in the grief of time’s passage, divorce, congestive heart failure, gravity itself-even as it perceptively sketches the exterior-jonquils, honeysuckle, smoke, turtles, chickens, and rocks-slowly and steadily building this earthy understanding that we are made of earth and also made to speak eloquently of earth. Kaber’s gift for metaphor and narrative offers us, again and again, moments of hard-won clarity where the challenges of a life yield revelations. Of a snapping turtle, the poet notes, “We have history, this turtle and I, a hard-shelled practicality, an order to our lives.” The book cumulatively gathers us in Kaber’s welcoming and wary voice and vision. Here, we are invited, as a kind of shelter, to know the truth of the “rough climb, no path across the rocks.” The poems feed us, invoking food, and also warn us of the “black stone that the world has become.”The poems’ integrity, their commitment to trace the material world at the seams where it meets the soul, holds even in the space of a hearse, where the poet finds “luminous planets.” Here is a poetry of “uncountable grains of touch,” a timely reckoning and reminder in our era that wants to forget what it is to be human.

Claire Millikin, author of Magicicada

The poems in Landscape with Rocks, Sky, Nails are alive with voices. A house speaks of its emptiness, its yearning for what’s outside, a shovel pleads to be used, bones speak of their origins. And Judy Kaber listens. She hears human dignity and astuteness in the voices of loggers and line workers. She hears the land and what living close to it has to say. Her attention to detail is stunning, as if language itself is a way of seeing. There’s a stalking cat’s tail slashing like a sword, elvers with their “thread-like bodies,” flies like “ochre angels fallen” to their earthly tasks. There is wit here, too, as one speaker recalls youthful (mis)adventures and now feels content “in the shadow of my lost insolence.” These poems are beautifully written and true in the way that lines and measures are true. That is, they come out of accurate and selfless observation, a flawless ear for language, and a deep respect for their subjects. Kaber’s vision is firmly rooted in the humanity of others, and that makes this a gently urgent and essential book.

Betsy Sholl, Maine Poet Laureate 2006-2011

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