Book Review: Voices on the Wind by Daniel Leach

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry, as in love, is perceived instantly. It hasn’t to wait the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but we knew at sight we never could forget it.

-Robert Frost

All great poetry is timeless. While it stirs the sense, it moves something deep inside us, something beyond our sense-perceptual apprehension of the world. It leaves us with a new quality of consciousness—a heightened sense of awareness about our own higher nature as human beings. We find ourselves capable of grasping not only the changing world of our external senses, but also another world, that of the unchanging and unmoving—the eternal.

Daniel Leach’s collection of poems is aptly titled, “Voices on the Wind.” The ideas that…