In this unique collection, readers encounter a variety of poems that act as a celebration, confession, declaration, and memoir. Pieces like “Christmas in 1947” preserve the memory of loving grandparents with boyish recollections balanced with the insights of decades. “Two Remembrances of My Father” tugs at the tenuous threads that tie life to death and belief to disbelief, while “Dying in the Morning Scent of Huckleberries” continues the conversation about, and the questioning of, mortality. These early poetic conversations establish the philosophical, existential insights, the various senses of longing for and pursuit of self-understanding, and the intricacies of one man’s relationship with himself and the nature around him that poems such as “Bucharest in the Afternoon” and “The Foiled Swim and the Slender Youth with His Dog Seen on the High Cliff above the Violent Sea in Ibiza” continue.

This book, with its intimate tone that quickly captures readers, allows readers to enter a humble narrator’s recollections and secrets, and the reader discovers eloquent depictions, fond memories, and a relatable speaker who exudes the purest humanity. Readers interested in memoir and narrative poems will gravitate to selections like “The Desired Boys of Summer and the Innocence of My Childhood Gazing 1967, Grand Rapids,” while readers seeking a more sensuous, spiritual experience will resonate with poems like “Image: Vision of a Soul” that celebrate the human body and the unexplainable within us. This book is easily accessible for those readers just discovering poetry, and it is also an intellectually engaging read for more experienced poetry readers.

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