When I was a kid, Dad had an Oldsmobile. It had everything - this was the sixties -power windows, power steering, power brakes, and in back a bench seat wide as the road. As with everything enormous in childhood now vanished from the earth, I want it back. It's here. It belongs to Gerald Hill. He's going somewhere and there's a place for you beside him as he drives, smoking with the windows down. As he talks, you can hear the study behind the casualness of his voice. He's looking for stillness where everything's on the move - breeze, wind, water, windmills, people in boats, the car, love. Things in this world are what they are, he is telling you, and then some. Even what we discard connects us to the possibility of the divine: "You'd think I fed angels, the way/an orange peel glows where it's been thrown/and still a day later glows."

-Richard Harrison
author of Big Breath of a Wish and Hero of the Play

Each poem in Getting To Know You had, for me, that secret beating heart of surprise. It's a collection that informs lyrically while keeping its feet on the ground.

- Susan Goyette, Poet