Water to Sustain the Spirit

John Holbrook is a storyteller. He writes personal stories, historical stories, scientific stories, imagined stories, each narrative poem lavishly illustrated by the detailed language characteristic to its landscape. From Michigan to Montana to the Grand Canyon, Holbrook gives us poems of love and loss, of pain and joy that his mentor, Richard Hugo, might say were "triggered" by memories and images Holbrook experienced along the way in his eight decades of riding the river of life. Water to Sustain the Spirit both comforts and entertains.-Mark Gibbons, Montana Poet Laureate (2021-2023)In these poems John Holbrook conveys a world vast and particular and a love for all its creatures. He knows magic and science can at times belong together and he gives us those moments in these lines that whip like a barbed fly across the dazzle of rushing water.-David E. Thomas, author of Old Power company Road