Rod Jellema

New Tracks, Night Falling

Arts & Literature

“Good poems are fresh ways of seeing. Here's Adam, quickly disillusioned with Eve for naming the yak the yak and singing off-key, yet learning to love what he's been given.' The Nativity scene, familiar to millions as the Silent Night,' is here for Mary the bleeding of the Infinite into that barn . . . as God came ripping through.' Such poems supply the faith-deep, myth-deep underpinnings for the book's rich sense of the ordinary and the now: grief for a friend who died, a child's hands, a bee, driving behind a sixteen-wheeler, rain, hearing the cry of a bird with the sky / caught in its throat.' Jeanne Murray Walker leaves her readers with the feeling of enormous power held in reserve only by the true instincts of a superb artist. This is her finest book.”