The poems in Learning to Miss are a marvel. Whether Paul Nelson is chronicling a journey, describing preparations for slaughtering sheep in Maine, or recounting the habits of a gecko on a Hawaiian wall, his poems ring with authenticity, the hard particularity that derives from sustained, close observation. Then he tells us, “Everything is everything else, all the time,” … and we believe him. – Don Johnson, author of Here and Gone: New and Selected Poems

The poems in Learning to Miss are a marvel. Whether Paul Nelson is chronicling a journey, describing preparations for slaughtering sheep in Maine, or recounting the habits of a gecko on a Hawaiian wall, his poems ring with authenticity, the hard particularity that derives from sustained, close observation. Then he tells us, “Everything is everything else, all the time,” … and we believe him.

Paul Nelson is so good at some things like the precise details of woods and water and rural life and old houses that one can almost forget the wide range of his work. This collection presents a sense of the amplitude of his mind, which is formed by the historical, classical and biblical worlds. Adam and Odysseus are at home in his mind as well as the intimate landscape of rural Maine and of Hawaii. This is a book that rewards repeated reading as the scope and depth of its concerns and its large contexts inform the individual poems.