Jonathan F. S. Post

Galileo’s Spyglass

Arts & Literature

“James Merrill once wrote, ‘To be twenty and a poet is to be twenty. To be forty and a poet is to be a poet.’ Sean McDowell’s first book, Learning to Jump, established him as a poet of unusual maturity. Galileo’s Spyglass builds impressively on this achievement. As with his poem on Kepler’s snowflake, these are lyrics of exceptional beauty, carefully constructed, everywhere alert to what Robert Herrick memorably called ‘Times-transhifting.’”