"I know the storm is coming when the hills are bathed," writes Rachel Neve-Midbar. What is this knowledge? What does the poet have to tell us about the world that is around us? She learns by asking, by questioning this very need to ask: "Wherever / you are," she says, "tell us why we need answers, / tell us what any light will reveal." She learns by watching, by noticing, by making the world come alive on the page. Attentiveness, the great poet Paul Celan taught us, is the natural prayer of the soul. This prayer is everywhere in these pages. But what we see isn't overtly romantic, isn't falsely exalted, it is the reality of the world, seen with clear, passionate eye: "Soldiers at the check point stand death-/chill, wax statues, watch us go by with lifeless eyes./A dog stands at attention next to the road,/his black ears point at the sky." What we see is the land torn by conflict, and bodies nurtured by tenderness, that despite any crisis, is here to still console us. It is a beautiful, kind, book, one filled with longing of last rites, with elegiac tonalities, and yet with fortitude of memory, which sometimes is as touchable as bits of earth that we hide in our pockets, to remember.