No one else heard the loon,
that thin, foundering, faraway cry
so sadly wild, fluttering
in the outer reaches between
what is here in this world
and what is borne out of it.

As if the bird never made a sound,
the numb, leathery silence
crept in, starless, calling her back
to a time when speech was inaccessible,
just before sleep blended
the slippery knock and stitch of sound.
A branch nodded
and the loon circled high above her.

She rose out of bed
and left her husband's comfortable breathing
for the mottled fawn grass,
the fir-bordered lake,
the lathering water at the edges of storm.
No one else could see her
and she knew the loon wasted nothing.

"Many lines and images from Margo Stever's Frozen Spring will stay in my mind, and I heartily recommend the book. Each poem contains its own 'frozen spring,' moments of loss that lead, by way of suffering, to informed experience (better known as wisdom).—Philip Miller, Home Planet News

"This chasm, this fissure, this ravine, is the magic of Stever's poetry. She is able to get into the mind of the other, and stays there though it is often difficult emotionally. She doesn't ease back and forth for her reader's comfort."—Denise Duhamel, Painted Bride

"The heart is quieted with flashes of the natural world as hope in coping with the impossibles of living. One senses these poems were written in the assertion of Wallace Stevens that 'In an age of disbelief…it is for the poet to supply the satisfaction of belief.' These poems evince a rare ability in which the poet presents a delicate balance between the dream and the real, the longed-for and the unattainable."—Gin Bender Poetry Review

"The sensitive tenderness of these poems, their ungainsayable will to touch and understand, make this collection unique in every way. Margo Stever listens to every sound, every edge of the words she uses here, so to 'get said what must be said' in an otherwise brutal world. She is an impeccable poet, and this book proves it absolutely."—Robert Creeley

"One reason Margo Stever's poems are so engaging is that they pay as much attention to themselves as they do to their subjects. Unfolding in a series of surprising metaphors and startling linkages, her lyrics move us from the ordinary into a realm of imagination and language whose only name is poetry."—Billy Collins

"For this wonderful first book, the natural world plays a major role—sometimes harsh, sometimes lyrical, but always beautiful. This collection of poems includes horses and oceans, a lost life of orchards and fields, the ghost of a dominant mother, a dead father, five siblings, and numerous half-suppressed fears for the poet's own children. Frozen Spring struggles to come to terms with loss and survival, and strikes chords of empathy in the audience."—Maxine Kumin

"Stever is an elegist, and there aren't many of them left this late in history. An elegist isn't just an unpaid mourner, or a deliverer of sermons, but a poet seeking redemption in a wide downdraft of negation. Loss is a dark field where images appear with supernatural naturalness. It's what Buddhists say of a world limned against the void . . . The image of the title poem perfectly expresses the self-sustaining paradox of loss and perservation that makes this book so emotionally overwhelming."—Rain Taxi Review

“Fauna and flora are, in a sense, all one, says Margo Stever. … The poet writes about the deaths of her brother, her cousin, her father, making the difficult choice to express sorrow calmly. … Yet even as the reader grieves with the writer, both see a larger pattern to the births, lives, and deaths—not an easy thing to bring off, but Stever does. … [She] shows readers a new way of looking at the world.”—Ohioana Quarterly