Poems filled with honest emoting - can’t ask for much more than that. Nice imagery with interesting word combinations. Just the type of soul examining, soul loving, and soul filling tham I enjoy.

Doug Stanfield’s new work, Lifting Stones in three sections, is dense with the weight of a life being observed to the fullest. Using a free-verse poetic style the author creates a memoir covering decades from his life. An honest narrative exposes the facets of his life without filters. He captures our universal experiences with a sparser style of writing than his previous work, I Come From A Place of Fireflies. And, it is apropos when faced with losing a spouse, selling a house, and the inevitability of aging. Yet, all this is counterbalanced with selected writings in “Memories” and “Turning Points.” There is nothing maudlin here. It is the clarity of his language that encapsulates the complexity of feeling and makes it accessible for any reader.

Re-uploaded review from June 2021.
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The poems here range from haiku to a piece of pages-long prose and from the timely ("Love in the Time of Corona") to the timeless. The title is well chosen: heavy burdens like grief are lightened in (and because of!) many of these poems, and the title poem is a wonderful metaphor for the writing of poetry. I especially love Stanfield's beautiful paradoxes: "Memory," for example, is a poem about your future. ( )

A beautiful collection of poems about what it means to be alive and struggle with beauty, time, loss and love. The poems reach into the universal experience and ask questions of the self and the world with gentle wisdom, demanding no answers but pinpointing the beauty in the question itself. A book to revisit and live alongside. ( )

This collection of poems reads as a tender travelogue and autobiography through the writers experiences of loss, love, hope, and grief. Truly a commanding and emotional look at the human condition. Highly recommended! ( )