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In Blue Between Owls, the poems draw their painterly images from the landscape, wildlife, and people of the rural Midwest, and from the Teays River, the ancient underground tributary that flows beneath them all.
In Blue Between Owls, the calls of great-horned owls from the tangled woods become both metaphors for longing and calls to prayer. These poems draw their images and inquiries from the landscape of the rural Midwest, its green seas of corn and soybeans, its great expanse of sky above, and the Teays River, that ancient underground tributary that flows below, informing the way faith might inform a life, giving rise to praise. In the "Migration" poems, which walk with a beloved friend through her final illness, a bird-sown sunflower springs up in the burn pile and is transformed into flame the way we may hope to be transformed into light-bearing beings in this world.
"Like stepping into a cool arbor from a scorching world, you enter—with sweet relief—the confiding, meditative, calming space of Daye Phillippo's Blue Between Owls, where 'A breeze sifts the feathery locust leaves/ the way the mind sifts memory, tenderly.' Hers is a cadenced, crafted language of deep composure; of value conferred by time, use. and sensitive attention; of kinship with even 'the sun, that old dog'—a world where 'one thing / becoming another / is just the way of things…'" — Eleanor Wilner, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets
"Daye Phillippo tends to her poems with the same precision she uses to tend chickens and tough barn cats. At the same time, she stays attentive to what lies beyond the periphery, especially coyotes that announce themselves loudly, sometimes leaving tracks alarmingly close to the house. Other tracks are more benign, proclaiming 'this is the small weight of a snowbird in winter / Of no great import, but making its momentary mark / as we all hope to do.' A hope that Phillippo realizes in this work." — John Minszeski, author of A Letter to Serafin