"Gilfillan is a storyteller whose appeal is more mystical than realistic."—ALA Booklist

Gilfillan’s -observations, quotations, etymologies, and classical forms are constructed by equal parts scholar and aesthete. He is a master of Low Distance. Gilfillan watches and then watches again. His writing is workman-like in the sense of what words are like, and luminous in its experimental directions.

"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated, and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be."—Tom Raworth

Merrill Gilfillan is the author of five books of poems and several books of prose essays.