Reviews

Poet, painter, calligrapher, and musician Robert Sund was a Northwest icon. Although often associated with quiet hermitages on the Skagit River estuary or Olympic coast, his many friends know he led a gregarious social life. Sund was as at home shooting pool in Seattle taverns as penning his distinctive, Zen-like poems in his boatyard cottage in Anacortes. Stories from Sund's decades of high times and late-night revelry are legendary. Allen Frost and Paul Piper have gathered a generous selection of reminiscences, stories, photographs and poems from a wide circle of Robert's friends, fellow artists, and associates. To these, the editors have added rediscovered early poems and writings by Sund, many presented here for the first time. A Flutter of Birds Passing Through Heaven presents an intimate portrait of an Ish River original. -Tim McNulty