The poems in Jeanette Marie Clough’s Island are insistent testaments to the ability of precise observation to reveal the emotional secrets that lie under surfaces.  Often dazzling, always smart, they transport the reader to many places—Southeast Asia, Scotland, the California desert, the neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles—every landscape meticulously dressed in the names of its rocks, flora, colors, tastes, and sounds.  Yet, it is the familiar islands of yearning, anguish, anonymity, and disillusion, whose scenery is beyond description, to which Clough ultimately brings us in these poems, in a language that is both brilliant and startling in the depth of its concern and understanding.

— David Oliveria