The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World

Published July, 2001 – Poetry Collection

“I dig with the boots of memory,” the poet says, and this figure of speech, homely, disturbing, wry, suggests the tone of The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World. Here are poems of loss, of triumph, of heartbreak, of dark probing, of love–most of all of love in a thousand guises.
— Fred Chappell

I was first struck by the voice in Tony Abbott’s poems. The idiom is contemporary, alive, dramatic, the lines fluent and exact. The language is alert, resourceful. I admire the delight and celebration, the openness and honesty, the willingness to confront fear. I admire the fullness of emotions in the poems, even a sense of the miraculous that takes us back to the very source of poetry ‘in the cradle of the world,’ as well as forward to poetry of the future.
— Robert Morgan