Upon a Slender Stalk

This collection of poems was assembled from five decades of writing. Uniting the poems is an attempt to find words that record the material world while also cracking it open to the mystery that animates all things. In this sense, the poems, even the secular and humorous among them, manifest the sacred, the holy present in every human, plant or rock. Should a label be put on the collection, and none fit well, they are poems built from concrete images, from a full opening of the senses, though sight seems to prevail. The poems provide the reader with the experience of joy and sorrow, pain and delight, a time to laugh and a time to cry. They open simple, ordinary events into larger spiritual realms. They grow from soil made rich from reading great poets, classical and contemporary, with special debts to John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Linda Pasten, Sharon Olds, and Mary Oliver. Writers of fiction, the liturgy of the church, the Psalms, the writing of great mystics and naturalists have also influenced these poems. In particular, I mention Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, St. John of the Cross, Thoreau, and Annie Dillard. The list is long. One always writes in the wake of other writers. Lastly, the poems grow from a quiet love lived with loving friends and family. The love and the quiet are present as subtext of many poems. They are poems about the little things which, pieced together, form a life worth living.