These brief meditations are as beautiful for what they donʼt say as for what they do. Charles Finn does not pad, overreach, or over-emote. His precision accounts of wildlife encounters summon awe, wonder, and magnificence when those feelings are authentically present, but just as readily summon comedy if the encounter was, as Edward Hoagland once put it, “like meeting a fantastically dressed mute on the road.” These are not fleeting glances: they are full-on full-bodied face-to-face invocations of the way animals and birds “speak out by saying precisely nothing,” uncannily propelling us into “the exact place where the world begins.”
— David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and My Story as Told by Water
When I know the name of a creature, Thoreau said, I find it difficult to see. Charles Finn has escaped that disability, and done magic: to summon the moment of encounter with a wild creature without killing that drama with too much mind. The feral moments in this book are deft, alive with exact detail, full, and short. This is a field guide to a different kind of outside, where the wise, wide-eyed child of the self meets ouzel, turtle, fox, and owl. We need more big short books like this one—after reading Finn, you will wander alert, humbled, wise.
— Kim Stafford, Author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft.
In the space of these twenty-nine encounters, Charles Finn invites his readers into a landscape of “uncountable geometries, great silences,” a primordial terrain in which “hunger is the beginning of everything.” Here, a crane’s flight is “the old machinery of the world lifting into the sky.” Here, we experience moments so stunning “there is no restarting the heart.”
Finn gives us the quality of intense seeing that transcends into insight, seeing that transforms into vision. In the encounter with ravens, he reminds us of what poets tell us: “Everything… shouts one thing, and one thing only, ‘Pay attention!’” And Charles Finn does. Indeed, he does. His words pay a rapt and rapturous attention.
— Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate
Charles Finn’s Wild Delicate Seconds is like a series of nature photographs taken not by someone who shoots pictures, but someone who takes the time to study the light and the surroundings and bring out the most unlikely aspects of each of his subjects. Finn writes like a poet and views the world around him like a painter.
— Russell Rowland, Author of Open Spaces
Wild Delicate Seconds examines those jeweled instants offering an invitation, brief portals into a more comprehensive, complete, and compassionate universe, instants too often dismissed with a glance. Charles Finns’s micro-essays distill keen observation and deep contemplation, articulating an interaction with the world at once inclusive, generous, and instructive.
—Robert Stubblefield
