Samuel G. Green

Galileo’s Spyglass

Arts & Literature

“It’s rare for the same person to write an endorsement for an author, but it shouldn’t be. If you go to a favorite restaurant and get a new and lovely dish, don’t you want to share the news, even if you’ve badgered your friends before? And that’s how it is with this new book by Sean McDowell, full of tender and reluctant elegies for friends and family (‘Too many/old friends gone, or gone away’), ruminations on the fragile existence of animals and birds. It’s a book that stresses gratitude, celebration, and a deliberate tenacity to live this life as well as possible. In one poem, he calls his uncle’s recipe for tomato gravy a ‘gift, comfort and remedy.’ So are these poems.”

Learning to Jump

Arts & Literature

“There is a peculiar state we enter when we’ve read a good poem, a sort of ‘post-poem’ reverie, eyes unfocused, turned inward, a letting go of barriers, allowing whatever might come to go ahead and change our lives. Reading McDowell, I find myself in this welcome condition over and over. He combines the discipline and patience of an internationally acclaimed scholar with a sensibility that recognizes the difference between poems that can be written and, like these, ones that should be. I love this book.”