Where Sweetness Falls With the Rain

Reading Margaret Coombs’s new collection is like standing beside a waterfall, savoring the world and our human and more than human connections as if experiencing them for the first time. Many of the poems in Where Sweetness Falls with the Rain are love poems—about a marriage, the morning light, the river, the grackles, and pelicans. Other poems bear witness—to the loss of Wisconsin’s ash trees and the curse of invasive plants—but also to Coombs’s grandfather who served in the U.S. Navy and survived a submarine attack. Coombs’s poems reassure us that the trees remember “the girl on the bicycle gliding through the woods.” Inspiring awe, hope, and compassionate action, these poems are “a summer evening/underneath a pink-gold sky.” They’re the “seeds that will help us survive.   Emilie Lindemann, author of mother-mailbox