Elizabeth Spires

“It is rare to encounter a first book of poems as clear-eyed and accomplished as Jim Tilley’s In Confidence. The press of everyday experience informs these deceptively calm poems, rippling with disturbing undercurrents. Whether imagining the incursion of windmills in Nantucket Sound (Vase of Tall White Stalks), or seeing ‘something fractal in forsythia’ (In Spring, Mathematics Are Yellow), Tilley’s imagination is fluent and unforced, his eye fresh to the natural world that he searchingly inhabits. At his best, Tilley writes about the ordinary moments in a life in an extraordinary way.” —Elizabeth Spires