The Dreams We Share

Review of The Dreams We Share by Raphael Block

Reviewed by Dave Seter, Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2024 – 2026) in Cider Press Review, 2024.

Raphael Block’s most recent book, The Dreams We Share, fulfills the need for contemporary nature poetry written from a spiritual point of view. While unapologetically expressing an ecstatic response to nature, these poems acknowledge the human capacity to heal or to harm our world. Countering the cynical point of view that planet Earth is too far degraded to save, these poems seem to say: celebrating what sustains us motivates us to heal our world. Read the full review

Reviewed by Rebecca Patrascu in the Colorado Review, 2024

Raphael Block’s new collection, The Dreams We Share, is a work of sustained and reverent attention to the natural world. The poet’s fifth book, it contains eighty-nine poems in five sections, and names over a hundred different plants and nearly as many species of birds, animals, and insects. This abundance might suggest the volume reads like a life list, but Block’s language is plush, his approach that of a pilgrim rather than a collector. He is notably faithful to place. Each redwood tree, fence lizard, and redtail hawk populates the lines as naturally as it would its native habitat.

… The Dreams We Share itself can be read as both an antidote to cynicism and hopelessness and a call to action for the poet and his readers. “I pray for my heart / to be set ablaze,” Block says in “Ablaze.” In “The Combination,” he tells us, “All depends on your loving witness,” and “You are the key to this universe. / Now how will you be?” After reading this new collection, one might find it difficult to be anything but aware of the beauty and fragility of life, ready to heed the poet’s admonition from “Thistledown”: “don’t let this world / escape you.” Read the full review

Endorsements

Nature, the first book of revelation, tells her story in these pages. The Northern
California landscape speaks in a multitude of voices, wild iris, coyotes, starfish, turtles,
and the many birds that belong to this shoreline. And within all these images, sounds, is
the pulse of the Earth Herself, asking us to be present, mindful of her beauty and
wonder. Take time to walk through these words, to become immersed in this mystery
that reaches deep into the soul. 
 
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Ph.D, Sufi teacher and author, editor of Spiritual Ecology: The
Cry of the Soul

***
 
Each poem in Raphael Block’s new book is a visitation; a message from a plant or a
turtle, that is also a prayer that keeps us more connected to the resurgent core of life.
In The Dreams We Share, the poet keeps bowing to “beings who survive it all,” while
offering countless ways to find the deep veins of peace in this “sea of man-made
storms.” 
Michael Meade, Author of Awakening the Soul and Fate and Destiny

***

Here are poems that celebrate what makes us human – the context of a complex and beautiful
Earth known in her intricacy, and love – in partnership, parenthood, and connection to the
sacred. These poems come from the heart, and this book will delight as well as educate its
readers.
Elizabeth Carothers Herron, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, California (2022-2024), author of In
the Cities of Sleep

***

Raphael Block has a monthly online newsletter called “Earth Love.” This is fitting because, in
his new book, The Dreams We Share, with a few notable exceptions, almost every poem could
be called a love poem for the Earth or animals, plants, and bodies of water thereon. Very creative
metaphors and similes abound (a spider as a Chinese character). As does musicality: (from
“Raven’s Eye”) “Arak, arak…. I dive into blackness to share this stillness with you.”
Phyllis Meshulam, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, California (2020-2022), author of Land of My
Father’s War