David Middleton

Bending Toward Heaven

Arts & Literature

“Poets across the ages have written ekphrastic verse--poetry that responds to another work of art. In Bending Toward Heaven, Sharon Fish Mooney joins the company of such poets--including John Keats and W. H. Auden--with these well-crafted, beautifully evocative sonnets that translate paintings by Vincent van Gogh into music, rhythm, and words.”

The Night When God Spoke French

Arts & Literature

“I have admired the poetry of Raymond Oliver for over forty years. Oliver strives ‘to keep the old poetic forms alive’ and recognizes ‘the need to keep trying to say it right, / Plain truth in plain language . . .’ Yet this plainness is the lucid medium that reveals a world ‘stained / With wonder.’ In such verse the poet contemplates experiences and ideas in ways that are, in the deepest sense, humane. . . . Poems in this book contain much that the reader will want to recall. Oliver’s finest poems are a fusion of wisdom and craftsmanship of a very high order. Like the fallen snow this native New Englander loves to look out upon again and again, these poems reveal the essential forms of the divinely ordained beauty and meaning of a world the poet gazes on in wonder, then quietly seeks to understand, accept, and finally, praise.”