<strong>Tornado</strong> is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death said WallaceStevens is the mother of beauty and so it is here around the loss of abelo... » 

Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death said WallaceStevens is the mother of beauty and so it is here around the loss of abeloved sister in childhood Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language bywhich he reveals what does not and cannot die in the scale of nature above andunderground in the movements of time and in the ongoing reach of humantenderness that glides through our skins like a wave lighting it up frominside. Alicia Ostriker Ted Lardner enlarges our range of wonder. For himthe task is to bring the jolt of another world to us by showing us that aspringtime apple tree is a brain in flower that comes to us from the otherside of human language. Each line of Tornado sends out a beam that flashes inthe line then bounces like sonar in the readers deeper parts where we keep ourbeloved dead.... Its as if Lardner did not write on a keyboard but with atypewriter ball with images not letters. The tornado is his image forleaving for an intersection where the living pass beyond the visible yetbegin the Orphic need for imagination. At the center of this vortex Ted Lardnercreates the space where the dead still have their Being and make their Rilkeandemand that we change our lives. This is a wonderful book. Bill Tremblay «