"In his new collection, Blind Rain, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into the surreal and the new. With spare, unadorned language, he explores what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time. Bond opens with several elegies, some of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems contemplate the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music. The work includes a long meditation, "The return," that hinges on the double sense of the word "true" as suggesting both "the real" and "the loyal," and so participates, often through personal and cultural narrative, in a post-modern conversation about the power of returning as a way of grounding us ethically and emotionally to the word at hand." -- Back cover.