Risking Delight

In David Stallings's Risking Delight there is a poem about building a cabin:

From a forested hillside our small home has risen, hand-hewn log by log notch by notch...

The same care and craft that went into building are also reflected in the making of these poems. Home and family are a central concern in this book: marriage, parenting, divorce, children, grandchildren, the primal world we all share. With graciousness and candor, mindfulness and compassion, David Stallings writes about the simple wonder of being alive. "In our beach grass bower / we roll onto our backs / still entwined/filled with starry brilliance / this light has journeyed/for billions of years/shift one atom/deflect one photon /and none of this / would be" This is a beautiful, big-hearted book.

~Joseph Stroud

In David Stallings's Risking Delight, the poet confesses, "I do not know if I am supposed to be here," a contemplation that infiltrates the spare, intimate poems in this collection. Guided by water, by breath, by dog, child, or Buddha, the poems reveal "those dragons who fought to a stalemate above this place and now grieve alone in wintry caves." The speaker meditates on birth and death, love, and loss, through a lens of passionate observation. Stallings's poems offer the reader "plenty of good fortune, like this small, unplanned loft where you and I will sleep." Traveling from Boulder Creek to the Yukon River, "where winding trail and stream often merge," expect to delight in this journey of rivers, from the center of "the lily's... tiny green planets" to the spiritual borderlands the poet inhabits.

~Jenifer Browne Lawrence, author of Grayling

An amazing collection. Migrations across natural-and human-built-landscapes underpin David Stallings's new book, Risking Delight. The movement of families, the changing of seasons, the longing for home-"a window not yet framed"-combine with close attention to avalanche lilies, western tanagers, old theaters, gulls and gas stations. Ultimately, Stallings presents us with nothing less than a vision of where humans find home in the natural world-with its"pungent aging kelp/spiced with basswood blossoms /served with sunlight."

~Jordan Hartt, author of Leap; Program Manager of the Port TownsendWriter's Conference