Spring Mills: Poems

Spring Mills, a small town in rural, central Pennsylvania, becomes in these poems by Mike Schneider a gathering place for four generations of a family over a century of time. Schneider takes readers to where a grandfather recalls using a hand-crank to start his Model T-shining image of youth & freedom-and Guernseys in a pasture bellow to be fed. Readers learn how father and son form links in a chain of manual transmission, / hands-on sequenced pattern of the letter H, and the poet's sonic facility opens our ears to the metallic / industrial click / of shifting gears. With these poems, we also go to where physicists search among what's fizzy out there in the universe-not only for elusive cosmological dark matter but also to hear our inner voices, human dark matter. In Once Upon a Time, a remarkable marriage of poetry with skilled science writing, the Big Bang is an unfolding like a rose in bloom and Love is evolution of the cosmos. What else can we do?-a thought the poem answers with longing for, perhaps, a simpler time, a Spring Mills of Summer evening quietness. A breeze. / The big tree across the street. / Everything made sense.