Photo Gallery

Artist Statement: As a poet and photographer, I explore the connections I find between the written and the visual arts, seeking their rhythms and gaps.Within the majesty of our western landscape lie the small and complex shapes and beings that give it texture, life, breath. I am drawn to what reveals itself to us minutely, intermittently, wondrously: night owl, the pollen-grazed moth, river bird catching flight. Within the malleable earth, how easy to overlook what is most tender, most brief. I often photograph birds, discovering metaphors within their flight, their repose that bring me solace and quiet joy. And hope. How lucky to witness a single heron raising its wings to the winter sun. Or to catch the beauty of intimacy in two doves entwined on a branch I could barely see, but did.

I am drawn now to the work of photographers like Yamamoto Maoso whose delicate shapes are barely alight on the photograph’s edge. The work of photography is the work of poetry, as I understand it now. It is archival; it creates the weft in the weavings of our memories, our losses, our loves: here this bird gone, and perhaps here, where we are simply the stewards of the non-human world that existed long before us, this bird rising into winter light, and these bones gathering it.