“Epic and idyll collide in the pristine, masterfully compressed lyrics of Elizabeth Savage’s IDYLLIAD. Under Savage’s microscope, one West Virginia garden and home become spaces for prayer, war, and the excavation of memory—wilderness ‘wipes its feet’ and becomes ‘visible like one / who splashes past.’ These poems wander and notice, bursting with a sense of wonder for the natural and domestic world—and in that wonder lies a devastating, compassionate wisdom. Savage’s poems startle us into recognition of the incredible beauty in a single shaft of sunlight, morels after a rain storm, or the sound of a grackle in the distance. In these poems, our ‘pronged planet’ ‘hold[s] its ground’ even as we find ‘acre after acre of elegy.’ Savage’s perfectly crafted lines burst with music, and seamless metaphors meld into one another with no start or stop, enacting the infirm boundaries between the human and natural worlds. IDYLLIAD argues that it is in the natural world that we are never disowned, even when we disown it or think we own it. One poem proclaims, ‘Because there is more / craving than there is mountain / most do not care // climb or wrangle.’ In these poems, Savage climbs, wrangles, and above all, cares—for the mountain, for the craving, and for everything in between.”—Alyse Knorr