Gary Michael Dault’s The Milk of Birds (Mansfield Press) is an exercise in brevity—each of the one hundred poems in the volume contains between fifteen and forty words. Dault presents the reader with images of nature and nature as metaphor in poetry that has the succinctness of haiku. His stanzas teem with flora and fauna: morning glories, pigeons, hibiscus blossoms, carp, worms, chrysanthemums and monkeys all make appearances in these lean lines. The Milk of Birds was inspired by Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese, and at times Dault’s work borrows heavily from other writers and borders on the derivative. The author has a tendency to overuse exclamation points and to disrupt quiet beauty with overenthusiastic sentimentality. However, The Milk of Birds does offer a sense of reverence for the small, sacred moments of everyday life, the moments that, in life as in film, get edited out and left on the cutting room floor.