Quiet, lyrical, and deeply reverent.
Muro offers a luminous meditation on silence, memory, and the natural world in his latest book. Organized in three movements; The Seasons, The Sea and Sky, and The Heart and Hands, the poems move with painterly attention through the natural world. Muro begins with the language of the seasons, where the tender return of spring, the richness of summer, the elegiac light of autumn, and the stillness of winter become measures of time’s passage. In “Goldfinch” and “Renascence,” mortality is framed through images of birds and forest floors, while “Something More Than Winter (Weighs Upon Me)” embodies sorrow made heavier by winter’s quiet pall.
In the middle section, the sea and sky extend the collection’s reach. The title poem, “A Bountiful Silence,” captures the stillness between tides, where “one must work harder to hear/ the breath of an elusive earth exhaling.” By contrast, “How Darkness Fell” draws on the smoke-choked days of 2023, when the sun itself seemed damaged: “a ruined sun drifted in and out of a sky/ choked with ruffled cloud like some unalloyed coin.” In its final section, the collection narrows to themes of inheritance, memory, and art. Muro’s language is lush yet disciplined. Skies take shape as mosaics, rivers as radiant canvases, silence as boundless as tide or snow. Each phrase carries a musical cadence, recalling the composers and painters who appear in the work. What arises is not flourish but quiet conviction: that grief and beauty cannot be untangled.
Readers attuned to poetry rooted in nature and art will find much to admire here.
Kelsay Books
Pub date September 15, 2025
ISBN 978-1639809844
Price $23.00 (USD) Paperback, $9.99 Kindle edition
Such a thoughtful and lyrical review of A Bountiful Silence. I really connected with your insights on how Muro’s poems weave together the cycles of nature and the weight of memory. Your reflections on “A Bountiful Silence” itself — the sea, the tides, that in-between stillness — truly resonated with me. You’ve captured so much of what I felt while reading this collection, and I’m inspired to revisit it through your lens.