The Few Drops Known

Blake pays attention. He brings a sense of exploration into the natural world and you see the beaches, the landscapes, the oceans, and especially the stars in the sky. There is tension and weight but, as you proceed through this collection, you can feel it lift. Blake shows us something behind the veil by quietly assessing his physical environment, whatever it may be. In the tales of constellations and fog and flying across the Equator and the streets of Haiti he gives us this, as in his poem "Balloon": Beauty not searched for but floated to and found. -Eric Chandler, Author of Hugging This Rock: Poems of Earth and Sky, Love and War (Middle West Press, 2017) and 3-time winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award for Poetry F.S. Blake says, "beauty is all around, or wherever you look for it" and the subjects in his poems explore the cosmos, economics, and agriculture to fulfill their desire to understand it; while the speaker in Blake's work "float[s] in the silence known only to angels / Above cell phones and sales reports" to find that our "one dimensional mission" is replaced with "stars we'll never plot." His search leaves him and all of us finding amazement in the world that pulls us in every direction toward the splendor of being alive even if we stand in, as the epigraph to the collections states, the "ocean of the unknown." -Robert Evory, managing editor of The Poet's Billow