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Ira Joe Fisher revels in storms and summer quiet, in the natural world that is at the heart of the best lyric poetry, and he moves all he touches "into something living." These Songs are a gift from a great talent: hymns as intricate and delicate as snowflakes to moments which should not pass unnoticed, in any century.
—Nalini Jones
author of What You Call Winter
Critics often talk about the voice of a poet. In Ira Joe Fisher's case, many of us already know his literal voice, having begun our weekends with it as we listened to The CBS Early Show. Now we have an opportunity to hear Fisher's poetic voice. Not a man for all seasons—but a man of the seasons and the memories they evoke. If "the lopped-off moon ... on the jagged rags of clouds" or "The tasseled yellow at the top of laddered leaves" or " a smokey-ghost wind works the surface (of Lake Sunapee) like a mason's apprentice" are your kind of lines, then Ira Joe Fisher's Songs from an Earlier Century is your kind of book.
—Rodger Martin
The Worcester Review
"I am finished with asking," writes Ira Joe Fisher. "I am working on accepting. / Your distance." With modest humor and affectionate discourse, with Robert Frost, "that father // mountain," hovering above his New England snowscape, Fisher plies his craft toward diminishing the gap between creation and creator, between substance and spirit. Crushing a bagful of northern spies that yields only a single glassful of cider, Fisher recognizes "more sip in that harvest than drink," yet Songs from an Earlier Century provides, poem by poem, sip by sip, a harvest that slakes our thirst for both authenticity and grace.
—Michael Waters
author of Darling Vulgarity
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