In Blue Mountain Dusk is one of those rarest of books of poetry, containing poems that ought to have been written, rather than poems that merely could have. McNulty is a careful poet, and the pieces in this book are the hard, clean nuggets left in the gold pan after washing and washing over and over. The love poems alone are worth the read, tender, and subtly erotic. As an observer of the natural world, this poet rates right up there with the best of the Chinese poets, or Robinson Jeffers in our own country. This is an honest poet, and these are honest poems. “McNulty’s evocations of nature demonstrate an engagement that is both intense yet gracefully detached. In passionate witness, his poetry moves like the wind over the landscape, stroking every leaf and stone it passes.” —THE SEATTLE TIMES “Tim MeNulty’s poems have a real voice moving them forward. Enriched by a love of common thought and feeling, enlivened by a musing on the wisdom tradition, and made accessible by simple and unaffected observation, his poems come to us wearing the familiar shirts and shoes poetry has always worn.” —ROBERT SUND “Tim McNulty has become one of the strongest poetic voices for a huge realmthat is new to history: the north Pacific, the western edge of the continent. These fresh, clear poems are full of subtle crossings from the wild to the human, from the ongoing world of forest work and life to the emergence of the new urban Northwest. Friends, family, tracks, the northern stretch, the spaces, and the cool darkness of the woods. Poems of craft and deep awareness that are graceful and hard-won.” —GARY SNYDER “Tim McNulty’s poems belong to the where and what of his life in a rare degree. They live in equality with moss, ferns, flakes of bark, river stones, roots, buds; their mountains are particular mountains. Reading them puts one among these things he knows with such authentic intimacy. If the tone of his evocations is more often elegaic than exultant it is because such close knowledge must involve, in our day, a great sense of mourning for the daily demise of so much; yet his love for what he evokes gives song to his images and inspires, even among those who may never see more than their outskirts, a will to cherish and defend the remaining wild places.” —DENISE LEVERTOV