There is tremendous variety in form, theme, and tone in the
poems in this volume. Many of the poems may strike the
reader as corroboration of Thoreau's view of wildness and
wilderness because Peake's love of wild things forms his
poetic center, but this book also includes intense love poems
as well as celebrations of birds and trees and lightning bugs.
Though Peake celebrates nature, he does not view it with
sentimentality. He faces without tears a world in which one
creature preys upon another for survival, and he looks without
fear to the "revelry of the grave" when his form becomes food
for worms and feeds the laurel bushes growing over him.
According to critic John Lang, Peake's poems reveal "a poet
whose ear is attuned to the music of words" His poems abound
"in beautiful lines and images: 'The black-necked waders cry
in their wet fields,' for example, and 'skies the white-faced ibis
soars.' Such lines embody in Fred Chappell's phrase, 'the eye's
joy.'" Like Peake's descriptions of finding a rare green kingfisher,
for readers of his poems, "Delight follows discovery."
