“Richard Meyer’s poems are a delight to read. Their rich language and metrical music draw us in, and give form to a wild and imaginative journey of ideas. These poems are both earthy and celestial, and the poet’s eye moves easily from wash hanging on the clothesline to meteors screaming through space. Anchoring it all is a cosmic sense of humor. The effect is enchanting.”

“Richard Meyer’s generous collection teems with wit and well-tuned songs. Meyer’s poems confront science with belief, thought with feeling, earth with spirit, and staunchness with uncertainty. To upend Robert Frost’s adage, his companionable poems begin in wisdom and end in delight. His serious concerns—at the heart of such poems as ‘The Autumn Way,’ his striking elegy for Gertrude Klugherz Meyer—affect us more deeply for their alternation with moments of hilarity: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Mosquitoes. Rain. Vacation without pay.’ There are too many of these winning moments to count. Orbital Paths is chockablock with signal pleasures, and reading it leaves one enlivened and renewed.”

“Orbital Paths, Richard Meyer’s poetry collection, takes you on a wide-ranging and fascinating ride. Heads up when you travel this road. There’s surprise at every turn, and around some corners you may run into yourself. Many of these poems sparkle with delightful humor, and in some the clever wit casts a dark shadow. From backyard birds to frozen waterfalls to a gun toting god, these carefully constructed, accessible poems will entertain and enlighten.”

“Orbital Paths is, by turns, a showcase of finely crafted, jewel-like poems of epigrammatic concision and glorious wit, and expansive poems of meditation and mythmaking. It orbits in the gravity of dimensions as infinite as the universe itself, highlighting cosmological and existential mysteries, mysticism, questions of God, and the whys and hows of being in ‘our sliver of eternity.’ In Richard Meyer’s capable hands, there is deft tension between irreverence and homage, sacrilege and supplication, passion and wistfulness, design and happenstance. This is a seasoned debut collection that smoothly melds science, religion, nature and the quotidian with wit and protean intelligence to achieve original insights and cosmic fun.”

“From love to death to our place in the cosmos, Richard Meyer leaves no thorny subject unexplored in this often mesmerizing collection. By turns playful and dark (and sometimes both), he puts a fresh spin on common experience, and gets fresh with the likes of Donne, Marvell, and Dickinson as he riffs on poems from the Western canon. Perhaps his greatest gift is his knack for arresting figures of speech: A field “sweats stones/as I sweat salt.” A woodpecker becomes a military inspector. Ardor is “a barrowful of hope/ balanced on a single wheel.” The human race, marooned in a “vast and bare” universe, mirrors a man lying alone in a bed meant for two. Here’s hoping that in our not-so-bare corner of space, Meyer will get the many readers he deserves.”

“Richard Meyer’s Orbital Paths is a big book in both scope and heart. He addresses abiding themes of love and death and destiny in poems that are sometimes humorous, sometimes grave, and over and over again striking for the directness of their aim—answering what may puzzle or confound us about being human with a well-crafted, sympathetic music.”