Mark Jarman

Pruning Burning Bushes

Arts & Literature

“Where Suburbans 'honk and veer' behind a neighbor's combine and Jesus walks into a bar to play pool with farmers, the poems of Sarah Wells study those juxtapositions of the urban and the rural, the wild and the agrarian which we live with in this country often without noticing. She notices and responds with the empathy of Theodore Roethke for the vulnerable non-human world and the visionary understanding of St. John of Patmos who knew a sign when he saw one. It is a pleasure to read a book of poetry dedicated to 'spirits reckless with praise and the need to be filled.'”

Six Sundays toward a Seventh

Arts & Literature

“The life in Sydney Lea's poems is entirely local, whether the locale is Italy, Montana, or his home in Vermont . . . The making of the soul that occurs in Sydney Lea's poems is intimately connected with the place where the making occurs . . . Sydney Lea's poems show us that all spirituality is local spirituality. He is our preeminent poet of the soul's making among local places and people.”