"In Andrew Merton's view of poetry, brevity is the soul of wisdom. His poems are compact. He likes plenty of white space around some image or pithy utterance ... Merton is like some elderly neighbor, someone we pass on the street for years without a second look, someone who-when we finally exchange a few sentences-seems to be thinking and worrying about many of the same things we have, someone we would like to spend more time with from now on." -Charles Simic