""Gold invoices the losses and worries of the last third of our lives: the deaths of old friends, the illness and deaths of parents, the breakdown of our own trusted bodies. And yet there is the abiding grace here of those moments when the plenitude of the world is incarnate in Crooker's elegant, accessible, and keenly observed poems."" --Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin ""This collection of poems is pure gold, filled with the gold of fall, of leaf, of goldenrod, of Frost's 'nothing gold can stay, ' of money, even of golden oils skimming the surface of a stew. . . . These compelling poems offer glimpses of the holy present in the natural world, in human love between child and mother, between wife and husband, and in living and dying."" --Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, poetry editor of The Christian Century ""It's gold, all right: Barbara Crooker's voice up close to us, the readers, catching colloquial glints. 'I'll show you what's really liquid, ' she confides in a poem about the stock market crash. 'It's sunlight.' While acknowledging the truth of pain, in poem after poem Crooker puts her remarkable gift for metaphor at the service of praise."" --Jeanne Murray Walker, author of New Tracks, Night Falling ""In the woods and gardens of Barbara Crooker's poetry, 'the leaves go presto chango, ' and so will you. I return to her poems for their magic of comfort in times of loss, for assurance that sweets remain and grow. She is the bird that stays to sing throughout the night when all the others have left for the winter."" --Paul J. Willis, author of Rosing from the Dead