PRAISE FOR "THE SCENT OF ORANGES"
These poems invited me in at once by conjuring scenery much like that of my Caribbean birthplace, conveying its lushness without resorting to verbal overkill. But they held me past second and third readings with something more potent than landscape: with mindscape, what Robert Frost referred to as “inner weather.”
- Rhina P. Espaillat
In this compelling collection of poems, Gretchen Fletcher skillfully uses the imagery of tropical fruit and the ocean to create lush scenes and apt figures of speech, as when the surf leaves on her memory "a shore strewn / with the driftwood of youth." The Scent of Oranges will leave you drugged with desire and considering where to go and how to get there. - George Held
Gretchen Fletcher has captured and distilled the essence of the tropics in bright swirls of color, heady scents, subtle poisons and strange sounds in the dark. This is a far cry from the crisp, starched world of her mother which she rendered in her first collection That Severed Cord. Fletcher now abandons herself here to all the seduction and terror inherent in wild nature. - Joyce Sweeney
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