Martin Walls knows how to end a poem. This is a rare skill. He also knows how to start one: which he does with gusto & brio every poem. The reader has to be prepared to keep company with pillbugs, for pillbugs “gladden” Walls’ heart; he identifies in their neat articulation a correspondence with great poetry, just as woodlice, or English pillbugs, haul “the deep past behind them in a sack.” I can see Walls in the company of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Kavanagh, and Elizabeth Bishop, cheerfully taking stock of the abundance of the world.
——Mairéad Byrne, author of Nelson & the Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press, 2003)

Spiders and moths, fireflies and centipedes—and each of us, as well—are the residents of Martin Walls’ Commonwealth, a gorgeous new anthill of a book that evokes, page by page, “the holy yes of boys who stare in wonder.” Walls’ invertebrates are rendered with startling detail, and it’s upon their “simple lives” (as one spider reminds us) that he’s “built his philosophy.” Beneath each stone he turns, Walls finds the minuscule clockwork of our world ticking faithfully.
—Philip Memmer, author of Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (Word Press, 2004)

Poems made from the most exacting and exhilarating attention; poems made of intricate interlocking parts that open up to intimations of vastness; poems made to puncture any complacencies about the nature poem: these are the wealth of marvels that Martin Walls gives us in his brilliant Commonwealth. —Lee Upton, author of Civilian Histories (University of Georgia Press, 2000)

see mention at http://www.ireadpages.com/current/poetry.htm