White Storm by Gary Metras, (Rockford, MI: Presa Press, Feb. 2018)
ISBN 978-0-9965026-9-6; 88 pp. $15.95
Two poems included in White Storm were first published in the Summer 2010 issue of Third Wednesday:
Short Listed for the Massachusetts Poetry Book of the Year, Mass. Center for the Book, 2019
“There is always something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it it the accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a place on your bookshelf.”
—Zvi A. Sesling, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.
“The 48 poems in White Storm are written in an accessible, descriptive style; sometimes foreboding, sometimes a bit rueful, as though the narrator is chuckling to himself….Metras finds meaning in the natural world and offers a thoughtful meditation on life’s mysteries.”
—Steve Pfarrer, The Daily Hampshire Gazette
“In White Storm, Gary Metras has given us a poetry of reflections….His poems often have a classic, lyric and almost mythological bearing as if he sometimes channels ancients, but without losing direct contemporaneity of language….but how words travel off the page to carry us beyond ourselves for others, a legacy of sounds we may savor and hold close in our lives. I highly recommend this collection by a poet young in his upper years.”
—David Giannini, Wilderness House Literary Review
“The poems in White Storm create perfectly crafted worlds from carefully chosen details. Like a wise and patient teacher, Gary Metras takes us from wherever we are at the moment and drops us into the world of these poems, guiding us through a place full of love and light that is still never quite what it seems.”
—Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones #19, Posted October 1, 2018
Orders:
http://presapress.com/books/white-storm
Gary Metras’s new book of poetry is River Voice II (Adastra Press 2020). The Author of twenty books and chapbooks of poetry, his poems have appeared in America, The Common, Poetry, Poetry East, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where, in April 2018, he was appointed as the city’s inaugural Poet Laureate.
The Unmapped Worlds in this book extend from history to a way of life centered on European villages to the marginally surreal experience of our own times. The poems are previously uncollected ones enjoying their rediscovery. Whether through the visions of a medieval mystic or the routines that defined existence in a small town on the free world’s edge, David Chorlton reaches for what brought the mind to life in the course of living from day to day. The desert emerges as it appeared to early missionaries and conquerors in the Southwest and comes to bear multiple cultures today. Writing is a journey to the poet, and the work here follows some occasionally surprising side roads for Chorlton. 
Spindrift suggests stuff blown onto beaches, beaches of discovery in one’s mind. When these poems show a squirrel, a fish, birds, a beggar, an Irish pub, or a dish we see these as metaphors which conjure up ideas or feelings from our own familiarity with them. A poem that begins as an abstraction, like an enemy or peace or patience, becomes objectified. Spindrift is comprised of whatever little gems might be found along the shore, examined closely to become part of the reader’s experience. These jottings of spindrift take off from that experience like going to an airport when you want to be someplace else – or like poems which say one thing when they mean another.
Laurence W. Thomas is the founding editor of 
Art Work
Terry Allen was born in Brisbane, Australia. He is emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he taught theatre arts. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and he is the author of the chapbook, Monsters in the Rain. He lives in Columbia, Missouri with his wife Nancy.
This year’s 3rd Wednesday Poetry Contest judge, Joy Gaines-Friedler’s poem, 
Third Wednesday Magazine 