Collected Poems and Prose

"A life's work of steady, compassionate, precise observation animates these deceptively simple poems, rooted in their landscape and making a sense of home over and over again in each one. A virtuoso of stress and line endings, Elaine Randell has the ability to turn the events of each day into a kind of thought-music, while the sequences of prose narrative vignettes provide glimpses of the difficult lives of the sorts of troubled people with whom she has come into contact in her professional work, sometimes tragic, sometimes absurd, sometimes hopeless, sometimes almost comic. It's all about the truth of things." -Ian Patterson