Blossoms and Shadows

In a poem entitled The Self-Unseeing, Thomas Hardy describes a scene of exaltation ending with the words: “Yet we were looking away!” Garth Lambert has never wanted to be “looking away.” In this series of poems, easy of access but with depths to plumb, he turns his gaze on the life of Man and of a man.

The earlier, more descriptive poems, inclined toward youthful enthusiasm and worldly beauty, already contain short shadows. The increasingly philosophic later poems explore the dark shadowy c...