The poems in this fine collection are by turns plainspoken, meticulous, bereft, and at times, outrageously funny. Such a combination is rich and inviting. We have a record of life and lives lived in the rural south as the larger waves of American history sweep it back and forth. That movement feels inevitable, but it's accompanied by the lull of verse strumming and plucking these lines along. The art is obvious and resonant, working as a sifter to soften and disperse a world that was in order to join the world that is. This is a book of honesty and affection and hard-won intelligence. One reads it and is transported and more firmly planted at once-exactly what we seek from poetry.

If poets had monikers like bluesmen, Thomas Alan Holmes's handle would be "Appalachian Smooth." He resolutely recognizes a telling moment and walks it out the line and stands it at the crossroads-where place, time, language, and music intersect. In the Backhoe's Shadow is a work of mature resonance from a practiced artist who has taken his time and humbly, yet expertly, accepted a calling.

In the Backhoe's Shadow celebrates the bonds of family in a time of rapid change. The poems display extraordinarily precise, photographic details of work and memory, childhood games and pets, sad country songs. Some are poems of dailiness and humor, and the legacy of a certain time and place. Holmes is a gifted storyteller of the struggle with contemporary uncertainties, of deep kinship, of love.