Dark Dreaming, Global Dimming

Joe Paddock writes in apprehension of what he has come to call the call the BIG STORY. Panting along the trail of our private agendas, not so many of us care to hear this story. But its voice is insistent. It sounds now from the deep recesses of our minds. It sounds, too as a sort of echo, from within almost everything we do. The BIG STORY, its plot beginning to move now at a truly rattling pace, is that our way of being here on planet Earth is reaching its limits, has brought us to an edge, to a point beyond which we had better not go.

Joe Paddock loves this "dear old green and blue" planet, and his poems are alive with birds, mesmerizing cats, snapping turtles, possums, and wolves. Even the spider's web "shimmers with exchange/and contains within it/the one in the all." The poet's job, as Paddock sees it, is to show us how far we have wandered from the "wisdom of the infinite" and bring us back into harmony with this natural wholeness--- something that this collection does in all its feathered, leafy, and earthy ways.---Joyce Sutphen

Reading DARK DREAMING put me in mind of a journal entry Aldo Leopold wrote in 1948: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."

Sixty-one years later, Joe Paddock echoes Leopold's pain; but we are many now who no longer suffer alone. A great wakening has begun, and with it enormous despair. The poems in Dark Dreaming admit to the pain and add to it the twin wisdoms of question and dream: As we near the dark yawn/that will swallow us whole, will we wonder if/we've been worthy of this/feast of shadow and light? In these fine poems, Paddock offers us direction, a celebration of belonging, and a sense of possibility both personal and cultural. I am honored to recommend this book. ---John Caddy