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"Evoking a 'periodic table of agitation' over the continued environmental plunder of Colorado and by extension the world, this powerful and beautiful book asks "How long before we are all fluent in earth?" It is a question for our times." 
                                                       

                                                ~John Calderazzo,
                                                  author of Rising Fire:  Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives

" To catalog ruin is an impulse long-embedded in poetry. Rarer is that vision that, in listing the scars of history and the scars of use, the harms of industry and the land’s blatant abuse, also knows it must sing back against the bruise of real beauty. Kathleen Willard’s Cirque & Sky attunes its lyric eye to the local ecological crises ranging from the ravishes of pine bark beetles, to the orange bloom of Benzene in rivers, to children sledding down radioactive mine tailings in Uravan, Colorado. But rather than lament, these poems seek, as Emerson would have it, that genius that repairs the decay of things. For hers is a vision that includes love and her song offers its necessary resistance to ruin. "

                                                ~Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Circle's Apprentice and A Whaler's                                                      Dictionary, a collection of linked essays responding to Herman

                                                   Melville's Moby Dick.

Environmental Educators are well familiar with the dictum ,"In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught."  This pro-nouncement by Baba Dioum concerning the guiding principle at the heart of the Environmental Literacy move-ment resonates on a deep level through out this short, but powerful collection of poetry by Kathleen Willard.
 
These poems honor and celebrate the natural world and re-engage the reader with nature in its renowned strengths, its intimate interpenetrations and its often overlooked fragility. Focusing completely on the environment of the Rocky Mountain region of Colorado, these pastoral and anti-pastoral poems resonate with the beauty and demise of our natural heritage.  
 
With the environmental events of the Rocky Mountain West are serving as the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world, Cirque & Sky is an important text in the environmental literary canon of the American West.