Paul Fisher’s poems in Rumors of Shore are set with both deference and a gentle yearning in the center of the wonder, mystery and occasionally terrifying randomness and brutality of the natural world. He generously beckons to us, the readers, to join him in his experience of nature, his questions, his sweet hungers: “Like a dew-studded seedling / I wanted to wear the rings of wisdom / rippling the heart of a redwood tree.” His is a soft, evocative, welcoming voice, resonant with a deep humility toward this world: “Sometimes I watch winter geese / veering back through dreams, / wild wings spread / like shadow-puppet hands, /. . .What use is it?. . . / no answer to my question / put to sun and moon and rain.” Paul’s thrifty, precise use of language, and in particular, metaphor, can astonish us with its unexpected, evocative images of the living world that expand its meaning, its importance, its essentialness: wishful skin, warm wine blooming, the moon rowing on, the pirated gimcracks of autumn, weeds riddling our walls with roots, as far as the wind can snake. This is a first book to be taken very seriously, and I am eager to read more. —Becky Sakarelliou, author of The Importance of Bone