Scott Ferry’s collection, The Long Blade of Days Ahead takes us on a sublime journey of all the cycles of life—birth, growth, death, and spirit. He uses all the careful tools of metaphor to pack and unpack both the detritus and the joy-altering small moments that inform our hungers and passion. The speaker has lived hard, these poems have an endurance and authenticity that speaks volumes to the human condition. Here is an observant and tender voice rendering a fierce love of the things he holds dear. Ferry’s incantations are prayerful, but not afraid to notice every side of an issue, to look inside a diaper or a death. The language in these poems is supple, a hymn, an anthem, a lyrical punk opera. There are places of deep prayer and revelry, as a reader, I felt myself go deeper into my own psyche, come out forever altered by these stunning poems that reveal both the ache and splendor of living: “This is how/ a small love expands like/ a breath into every dark place.”
-Cynthia Atkins, author of Still-Life with God
Scott Ferry 