Shadows of the Heart

These poems sing the body’s fierce desire to live forever and the mind’s almost-sacred wonder that it was ever here at all. But free of what Whitman called the fear of knowing, they can hear the hum of time’s seamless disappearance, riding the spinning tendrils of the mystery of silence that, like brief flowering seasons on high mountain meadows, try to make less seem more, for “surely there are men who’ve made their art out of no tragic war, lovers of life, impulsive men who look for happiness and sing when they’ve found it.” They search for covenants of faith without borders, gods without omniscience, and unbloody sacraments that seek protection from nature’s deadly indifference.