A Review Of Mountains that See in the Dark by Regine Ebner (Black Bough Poetry, March 2025) – By Vikki C.

What a rare, astonishing gift to witness these stunning, imagist poems that conjure a far greater panoply of human experience than their quiet, shimmering fragments seem to suggest. A cinematic awakening to the Sonoran Desert’s breathtaking yet volatile wildscapes, border towns and pristine expanse, Ebner's world is one born of its own scintillating language. 

Transcending memory, spirit and time, we enter a lucid, dream-like catharsis of history and a natural world awaiting its explorer’s own introspection and pilgrimage. We sense life’s unknowability shift hourly with the horizon, where our own imprints mark "a humming oasis / with eyes of invisible perception". 

Wherever we have traveled from, we are found anew, edified by the poet’s enduring vignettes, listening to the prowess of how "Light breaks upon the bonds of salted land". Where doorways to chapels and saloons open in shades of isolation – yet invite us to "sip on the end of summer / like vagabonds with borrowed wine".

Ebner yields each precise line like a “wind-compass” navigating an alluring terrain whose mystery and climatic vagaries mirror our own. 

And wherever we must travel from here, we’ll never quite abandon the land’s philosophical undulations whose dust colours our very emotions with a startling transience. We shall certainly overstay – as humans, as eagles…as “half-leopards prowling the sea”. Stay, entangled in its mirages and reliced silhouettes. 

Here, we are disciples to the poet's luminous vision, where “We remember rain and handsome youth / and the past sweetens the present.” 

Prescient and intimate in its address, Mountains that See in the Dark interrogates the liminal spaces weathered and resculpted by the magic of both the elements…and the sheer mastery of a poet’s mind.

Mountains that See in the Dark is available on Amazon in e-book and in print. Further details can be found on Black Bough Poetry’s website:

https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/regine-ebner-s-collection