"Chard deNiord is the bard of the bardo in Westminster West. Totally at home in the transformative place between life and death, dreaming and waking, deNiord writes characters who search for their lovers—Adam and Eve, Heloise and Abelard as well as anonymous young darlings and mistresses, widows and widowers. Chard deNiord’s spiritual, visionary voice has found the perfect vehicle in these love poems-- You must believe without/any evidence or reason/to believe that your beloved/is standing behind you waiting….The graceful poems in Westminster West embrace wonder and pair—exquisitely—mortality and eternity."

Denise Duhamel, author of Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing

"I recently told a young editor who was guilty of agism that, unlike UFC boxers, poets get better as they age. Chard deNiord certainly proves that dictum right in his brilliantly written and always surprising Westminster West. deNiord has spent his entire career mastering the art of seamlessly blending the imagery and rhythms of the learned and natural worlds, equally comfortable writing about Enkidu, Odysseus, and Heloise and Abelard, yet ready at any given moment to shift gears and explore the secret life of lambs, fish, and locusts. The stunning metaphors and unexpected leaps in the first three poems of this volume persist until the final poem “Credo,” where the narrator writes: “Time is at the mercy of thought. / I either live in this mercy or not / singing in the dark.” We can only hope that deNiord keeps on singing and that his song reaches a current poetry audience, who, like the rest of America, is certainly in need of some uplifting."

Peter Johnson, author of While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

"Chard deNiord’s poems are philosophical, clever, erudite, and spiritual in the best sense. He can invoke Roethke, Clare, Shakespeare, Abelard and Heloise, at the same time he finds a quiet joy in his rootedness to Vermont’s earth, the singing of insects and birds in the title poem. This is a poet who wrestles with memory, most vividly in “Bronchoscopy,” where a boy eager to watch his doctor father work ends up with a patient’s sputum in his eye. There is deep compassion here, too, watching a Medevac helicopter in the sky, or in “Night Nurse,” the portrait of a healer with a gift for the art of listening. There is even advice on teaching poetry to freshmen. Few poets are both lyrical and grounded, wise with years and yet so open to the new day. Such a poet is Chard deNiord."

Martín Espada, author of Floaters