The solid rightness of image after image in Ken Brewer's poetry was never better than in Why Dogs Stopped Flying. His familiar style is plain-spoken, his humor reliable and
self-ironic. Yet, in this collection perhaps more than his earlier work, the particularity of the poet's insight into the physical world and the warmth of his affection for it combine
to create an unexpected transcendence. Beasts and bodies are transformed in his lines, and our dim, unremarkable lives on this shadowed earth become somehow more
luminous—small words to the moon, small suns opening in the dark.