Jeanne Murray Walker

Accompanied by Angels

Arts & Literature

“What a remarkable steadiness of attention is documented in this book! It is deeply moving to think how these poems were made ritually, one a year, slowly accumulating for sixty years. Luci Shaw is one of our most gifted poets; maybe that's why this archaeological dig to her beginnings makes me so happy. It is fascinating to watch her marshal her forces, gather linguistic power, and fill a lifetime to the brim with limpid, startling poems.”

Alphabet Year

Arts & Literature

“In my joyous and tricky romp through Alphabet Year, I discovered exhilarating ways of putting words together; I discovered words I didn't know, words that can be used to stitch and hold back impending chaos, words I now keep like pets. Alphabet Year is a book like no other I have read. It dives with zest into the turbulent ocean of language. With improbable love it wrestles against human cruelty, time, and death. This is an important book.”

Ampersand

Arts & Literature

“As its title, Ampersand, suggests, this book proceeds by addition. It bountifully celebrates language, the gift God honored when he asked Adam to name the animals. On every page, Ampersand praises the very instrument of telling. I love its wonderfully inventive babble, fizz, flash and dazzle of sound as it retells biblical narratives, as it muses on places and things of this world.”

Attending Others

“Attending Others is a tour de force, a page-turner that poses complex and fascinating questions. It reads like an astonishing account from a strange country: the inner life of an attending physician as he chooses medicine, faces the first cadaver, and goes on to train and practice. With humility and humor, Volck commands both the idioms of medicine and the lyricism of poets. He confesses to flashes of fear but also to moving moments when the icy distance that lies between doctors and patients has melted. The practice of medicine often restores people to health, as Volck's memoir reveals, but medicine can also fail. Even then, as Volck points out, a doctor has something significant to offer: 'We gave them all we could,' he writes, 'our time, our presence, our attention.'”

Falter

Arts & Literature

“To enter this book is to slow time. It is to pay attention. It is to reflect on love and death, to read the runes of our own cells, to see shadows slide across a lawn, to feel the membrane thinning between the sight of a sleek roan mare and the transcendent. Falter offers a break from our speed-maddened, fame-hungry culture, a pause to consider what it means to be human now, in the moment. I am delighted that I lingered to watch with Marjorie Stelmach how a 'creaking wheel of starlings / suddenly buckles and re-mends.' To read this book was, for me, to gain back my own 'every morning: this slow machine / of on-goingness.'”

Gold

Arts & Literature

“It's gold, all right: Barbara Crooker's voice up close to us, the readers, catching colloquial glints. 'I'll show you what's really liquid,' she confides in a poem about the stock market crash. 'It's sunlight.' While acknowledging the truth of pain, in poem after poem Crooker puts her remarkable gift for metaphor at the service of praise.”

Particular Scandals

Arts & Literature

“The scandal of this collection is it sizzles with such life, such particularity, such fierce pain and love, that you may not be able to put it down. Chatting about the weather, reflecting on ill health, estimating our chances of happiness, recounting adventures of a Labrador retriever and the astonishment of the incarnation, Julie Moore sounds as close as a friend. And yes, she is as trustworthy.”

Scape

Arts & Literature

“Luci's most witty, brilliant book. . . . One after another, these poems ground the reader utterly in the concrete and physical--and then, with the jet engine of metaphor, they take off into the world of spirit.”

Second Sky

Arts & Literature

“This is a remarkable book. The poems are brief posts about the fissures--cataclysms--emergencies in the daily life of a parent, a spouse, a friend. It was only after devouring the book that I went back to check on how each poem glosses a passage of Scripture. There are layers and layers here to uncover. I will discover them slowly, but meanwhile, I love the fierce brio of these poems. I love their intelligence and urgency.”

Six Sundays toward a Seventh

Arts & Literature

“In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea's affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.”

Tart Honey

Arts & Literature

“Tart Honey is a page-turner. It tells the story of commuter love, marriage a la mode. The few days the poet can afford to spend with her lover pass quickly. They are full of urgent beauty: “peaches ripening as slowly as the sun . . . the wet moon startling birds into song.” Read Tart Honey for its lyricism, its faith in love, and its careful thought about what love means.”

The Risk of Returning, Second Edition

Fiction

“A remarkably haunting novel. I love the characters, especially the narrator, a reluctant and complex guy. With him we sift through dangerous half-truths, decode sleight of hand, and weigh the fidelity of the people around him.”

The Shapes Are Real

Arts & Literature

“The exquisite arrangement of sculpture and poetry in this book offers such a profound experience of both pleasure and spiritual depth that I am left almost at a loss for words. In the time you spend with the book, you will find an alternative to the trivial and the terrible that sometimes seem to dominate current American life. Like me, maybe you, too, will pick this book up over and over to re-experience its breathtaking vision. Get two copies: one to keep and one to give to someone you love.”

True, False, None of the Above

Arts & Literature

“In some of these poems, Marjorie Maddox riffs on the poetry of other writers. Sometimes she sings like an angel, even about illness and death. She wields forms brilliantly, and she tells delicious stories about what goes on in her classroom. Everybody who relishes good poetry should buy this book. But if you're a teacher--or if you've ever sat in a classroom anywhere--True, False, None of the Above will make you laugh out loud.”

Within This Tree of Bones

Arts & Literature

“Robert Siegel possesses the transformational power of a wizard. Whether he casts his eye on a pig or a night crawler, whether he is standing in falling rain or in a swath of sunlight, he can make the world seem more like itself. For forty years now his poetry has been clarifying the world for me. Bob's new sonnets bring biblical subjects and landscapes into such intimate and vivid language that I will never again think of them in the same way. The things he writes about--as he says in 'The Annunciation'--grow 'more distinct, themselves / in a way beyond explaining.' That seems to me to be a brilliant definition of what great poetry can do. It clarifies the world beyond any other kind of explanation. This book does that. It is filled with great poetry.”

Your Twenty-First Century Prayer Life

Arts & Literature

“From the rough and tumble of daily work and children, Nathaniel Hansen carves out time to pray, as well as quiet moments to reflect on what he calls his prayer life. It is a journey fraught with interruptions, redirections, and finally, sometimes, connections with God. It’s a fine companion for anyone who is serious about praying.”