"I first read Gabriel Welsch"s poems when I was a guest editor for West Branch and a handful of his poems came across the transom. They immediately distinguished themselves for their making new age-old themes and for their evocative language. Both of these are everywhere on display in this, his second full-length collection. The poems return again and again to the natural world and reveal how it instructs us in silence, patience, and humility--and how it gives us ways to approach life"s riddles, among them faith, love, and death. The particulars of the land the poet"s eye rests on are rendered in diction that is precise and as exquisite to the ear as it is to the mind. There are echoes of other great lyric poets throughout this collection--Stevens, Dickenson, even Frost--but the music Welsch makes is all his own. The Death of Flying Things is a song to the place we inhabit, physically and spiritually, which also comes to inhabit us, "this place...that reinvents darkness every night." --Shara McCallum, author most recently of This Strange Land "Gabriel Welsch"s The Death of Flying Things isn"t comprised of elegies so much as love poems written to the long-suffering earth and for those who live on it, "the sky shattered under the burden of expectation," as one poem puts it. His poems comprise a complex vision, one up to the task of both recognizing the threat in how "what is left in the breeze / foretells ash," and still speaking, with assurance, of loving the magic of how "the hornets return / to the rusted lantern / bees to the blue mist to drowse /away the cool nights." These are poems enthralled with words and how they can love the world, from a poet who remembers "everything sacred comes from the body." --George Looney, author most recently of Monks Beginning to Waltz