Shadows of the Heart

About the Book

These poems sing the body’s fierce desire to live forever and the mind’s almost-sacred wonder that it was ever here at all. But free of what Whitman called the fear of knowing, they can hear the hum of time’s seamless disappearance, riding the spinning tendrils of the mystery of silence that, like brief flowering seasons on high mountain meadows, try to make less seem more, for “surely there are men who’ve made their art out of no tragic war, lovers of life, impulsive men who look for happiness and sing when they’ve found it.” They search for covenants of faith without borders, gods without omniscience, and unbloody sacraments that seek protection from nature’s deadly indifference.

About the Author

Born and raised in that unusual part of Nebraska, where there are more trees, rivers and hills than flat farm ground, a place rich in Arcadian legend and myth, his poems seek to reclaim the slow drama and texture of people’s lives before speed took away their voice and size, took away their individuality. He lives now With his wife Jeanette on the side of a mountain just outside Blacksburg Virginia, where he taught English and coached the tennis team at Virginia Tech. He writes poetry trying to follow Robert Frost’s elegant admonition “…to love the things we love for what they are.” He’s published six books and two chapbooks of poetry. He has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize in poetry and has appeared recently in Southern Humanities Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore Atlanta Review, Potomac Review and the Connecticut Review