Pete’s first poetry collection is a knockout. It reveals the same keen intelligence and wry perspective he showed in his two memoirs, with an eloquent, unique style that lays bare the universal in the deeply personal. He can add gifted poet to his already impressive resume.

Peter Coyote’s new book Tongue of a Crow is incandescent. At first read, his poems are all energy—kinetic universes exploding or imploding, line by line; transformation engines charged with immediacy, sometimes edgy, sometimes elegiac: ‘[m]ixing his mother’s ashes / with birdseed, elbow-deep/in a galvanized pail, / swishing the whispering / seed with ghostly flour, pollinating each grain/with her smoky voice and pearls.’ A Ferris wheel turns at the center of this book, the Big Wheel, and you sense the depth at the core, the apprehension of transience. Utterly personal and specific, these poems channel the impermanence in which we all live and die, not knowing why we love our suffering, certain only that ‘the world is burning.’

Peter Coyote’s poetry is like his work as an actor: subtle, powerful, humble yet blazing with an inner light and heat. This is a work of range and wit and natural beauty. My favorite poem is “Do We All Mourn,” which has this evocative line: “Memory’s a room with drawn shades,/light seeping around the edges, but/too dark to read.” The whole collection is haunting, poignant and dazzling.