“Betz has waited all this time for his first book of poems and for us readers it’s worth the wait, as these poems reflect the humble inner and outer lives of the author in poetic detail and profound musings, each poem being the image of what he sees in those binoculars he peers through in the author photo at the end of the book . . . From the NC mountains to the Outer Banks, Betz brings many and varied perspectives and subjects of interest, showing an inquisitive mind and a keen eye, from Shakespeare to Milosz. . . His Haiku says it all: think what we may catch/in the holy limpid depths/with our net of words. His ‘net’ has caught this reader.” - Thomas Rain Crowe, author of Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods “His poems ring with the clink of cowbells, the clang of a hemlock branch on a metal roof, tick-tock crickets, the soft fall of a poplar petal into a cobweb, the rasping and screeching of iron on iron, the whispering water of fallen mountains, and the siren song of gravity. He paints what he sees and what he doesn’t, the visible and the invisible, beyond the margin of sight . . . He uses metaphor as a subtle tool of understanding, making it hard to tell where metaphor ends and rock begins. Yet all his poems strive for the glorious insomnia of complete wakefulness, a waking up to the glories of nature but also to the glory of an oncologist’s report that reduces a merciful day to such absolute joy.” - Randolph P. Shaffner, Retired Professor of English and Comparative Literature