"In Pearly Everlasting, Thomas Reiter crafts authentic lives, both autobiographical and fictional, historical and contemporary, across a wide range of locales, maintaining a steady focus on the lore of occupations while revealing the speakers' crucial connection to the natural world. These poems come in earthtones - the colors of strenuous labor; dried flowers from a midwestern prairie; a centuries-old bone newly uncovered; the surf and sky, gold and coral deposits, of the West Indies; the pure soul of a freshly thawed stream; and pepperbush, Indian pipes, yellow gorse, anemones, pearly everlasting, spoken as lovingly as children's names."--BOOK JACKET.