“The physical world is a natural anatomy for exploration. Only when the poet’s “knowing reality” combines with sensations of his imagination does it become art. In Earth Suite, Cliff Bernier brings poetry to just such a vivid fulfillment. His observations are a humanist’s encounters, expanded into philosophical experience. Each poem in this book captures the continuous present, with clarity and precision. Bernier achieves richness with unforced power, relying instead on simplicity and a purity of style so persuasive, it makes you wish for more.”
—Grace CavalieriProducer/Host, The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress
 
 “Cliff Bernier is a lover of the earth and of her peoples; of forests and rivers; of plows and cities; of Seoul, Japan, Zimbabwe, Virginia, home. Traveler, seeker, powerfully cadenced praise-singer, he embraces the humble and earthy, the cosmic, the natural, and the human, the exotic and the modern. Bernier’s savvy, post-Edenic vision is both pre-national and trans-national; and, like Whitman and Snyder, deeply, profoundly American.”
—Judith McCombs, Author, The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New
 
 “Earth is planet, earth is loam—the bookends of these lovely, well-crafted poems. Either way in Cliff Bernier’s Earth Suite, earth is alive with beautifully organic and exotic aromas, colors, sounds, suns and sands. And there is nothing too enormous (the Big Bang) or too small (the curl of an ear) for Bernier. With his keen eye and heart, with his love of language, place, and myth, the poet subtly folds himself into the circularity of content; he becomes the ocean wave, the wind’s current, the very earth under his feet.”
—Anne Harding Woodworth, Author, Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse