Temporary Shelters
by Grant Clauser
(Cornerstone Press, 2025) Reviewed by Robert Fillman
Part elegy, part warning, part call to action, part escape, the temporary shelters Grant Clauser creates in his poetry offer “momentary stays,” to borrow Robert Frost’s phrase. And readers could do worse than to take up residence inside these poems.
Clauser writes with reverence for the earth and the diversity of life it sustains. The evidence in Temporary Shelters is abundant: “Marigolds,” “Planting Strawberries,” “The Glaciers,” “Weeping Willow,” “Box Turtles,” “Sycamore”—the list goes on. Because Clauser so fully engages non-human nature, one might assume that he dips into a well of familiar symbols. But that could not be further from the truth. Like the world that inspires him, Clauser reveals how the everyday—a creek, a nuthatch, a sunflower—can still be encountered with awe, observed from a fresh vantage. What is so refreshing is how Clauser rouses the reader out of ourselves and into the miracle of what surrounds us. He is a tour guide. He is a sage. But most importantly, he is attuned to the senses, and through his expansive and sharp eye for bare life, our own are heightened.
The collection opens with “NASA Announces Plans for a Peopled Mission to Mars.” While the title suggests the promise of exploration through space travel, the poem itself is far from optimistic about what this means. Clauser focuses instead on earthly details—a “perfect” brook trout and the “rust red / stripe on a salamander’s back,” “how hard this trout fought” to stay alive. He laments the daily erosion of the natural world: “every day / something beautiful is disappearing.” For Clauser, the earth is “dying under our feet,” and the impulse to flee it—to abandon rather than revere the planet we have damaged—becomes the poem’s quiet indictment of our species. Like he says: “Every day another piece of hope / is bleached or broken or hunted / into history.”
There are also many moments of tenderness in Temporary Shelters. By the end of the volume, readers can be assured they will find themselves feeling closer to their loved ones, their pets, their homes. “Blessings of a Dog,” for example, draws us into an ordinary scene of playful affection between a pet and her human. It is the precision of the verbs that brings the moment alive: chases, dives, slides, trots, asks, gnaws. The puppy feels so near that we seem to be standing in the kitchen alongside her. Yet, a sense of foreboding pervades the interaction—the knowledge of the creative-destructive cycle:
She’s still a pup, has enough play in her
for twelve years or so. I know how that goes.
You love, they love. Everything goes on
like it should until it doesn’t.
A lesser poet might stop here, at the edge of sentimentality. But Clauser does not. Instead, the poem widens its lens: “She doesn’t / know there’s something broken in the world / that a ball can’t fix.” What follows is more devastating still, and best left for readers to encounter on their own—to feel the distant weight of tragedy bearing down as it creeps closer.
As readers will see, every poem features sure-handed lines that speak with authority, though often on life’s inevitable mutability and to a past that feels close yet remains impossibly out of reach. In “Watching a Flying Squirrel,” the poet finds a fitting analogue for the human condition: “Life is risk, and love too.” And it is the nimble precision of the poem’s metaphors that animates its momentum:
When my daughters
were born my wife and I imagined
branch after branch for years within reach,
not the ones we fell short
or that left us hanging by a claw.
Formally, the enjambment—the fluid movement of memory itself—carries each detail down the page with the care and alertness of an animal instinctively aware that one wrong move can cost everything.
Again and again, Clauser leads us into the heart of things. Sometimes that heart is a crumbling structure in the woods, as in “Gunpowder Homestead,” where “ghosts may come and go / like hummingbirds in the afternoon.” This is a story we know: of arrival and departure, of human lives that leave behind “ruins on the one hand, / succession on the other.” What remains is taken back by the natural world—by the coming of spring, by a rising creek, by the steady march of time. Clauser reminds us: for that person, a family, or lineage, to secure a life meant “breaking / oneself against the land until it breaks.” Eventually, the stone walls become grave markers, mere evidence that someone once settled there. And if we are fortunate, the earth is still able to reclaim what human lives once transformed and dominated.
Beyond the physical losses etched into history and the land, Clauser turns to quieter, more internal forms of loss that take place within the self. “Epistemology II” takes us into the digital age, a time when we are shoring up the ruins of our own minds. Here, Clauser recognizes the whittling away of attention spans and those moments when we long to disconnect, to “just be satisfied, at least / for a little while,” perhaps finding solace in the simple comfort of “a dog pressed / against my leg, not worrying / about how long this will last.”
The end of the collection is elegiac in nature. “Taking Down the Lights” begins: “Every celebration has to end, / lest we get too easy with joy.” In a poem centered on the traditional act of taking down decorations after the holiday season has passed, Clauser opens things outward: “Each year feeds into the next / like small rivers flowing / into larger ones.” In doing so, he moves the reader from the ordinary rhythms of clock time into a deeper, more subjective experience of living. We feel the gravitas of the everyday—the residue of what we touch and carry with us. This poem isn’t merely about “pull[ing] the wires off / the eaves”; it’s about thinking beyond calendrical dates and recognizing that our complicated existence persists across generations, across eons. We experience life and death, joy and sadness, light and darkness. It is this honoring of ebb and flow that gives Clauser’s verse its urgency and relevance beyond these immediate, turbulent days.
External reality might tell us that we are all, in effect, doomed passengers on a sinking ship veering toward climate collapse. But internally, we have to know that we can still contribute—that if we can’t save ourselves, we may yet save others—and preserve the planet for future generations. Grant Clauser’s Temporary Shelters gives us a place to rest, to look inward, to reassess, and to change. It gives us a space to do nothing but think and feel, which is what humans do best.
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin Books, 2022), the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019), and his most recent collection The Melting Point (Broadstone Books, 2025). He has received prizes from Sheila-Na-Gig online, Third Wednesday, and The Twin Bill for select poems. He has been a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Gerald Cable Book Award, the Sandy Crimmins Prize in Poetry, and the Ron Rash Award in Poetry. Individual poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Nashville Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and others.
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