Café Dissertation

This poetry collection of love and wonder makes clear that what lies in the grave truth of love is an inherent loss. Yes, the poet says, there is pain here, but it is akin to, say, what is felt when a thorn is plucked quickly from the flesh and followed, then, by the warm flush of sudden clarity, a keener knowledge-the astonishment at being fully alive. It is the passing of all things which gives them their preciousness. Yes, this is a fallen world replete with the sting of death, but it is redeemed each time that sensing the cost, we choose to love anyway, embracing its necessity. Whether it is in stopping to notice the widower, the anorexic, the disabled child, or cattle to slaughter, spare buttes and dry fields, landscape specific to the harsh beauty of the interior of California, we too stop as if at stations of the cross, infused with a kind of religious Yes to our allotments of sorrow as they prompt us again and again to go on living fully-loving. This is no work of theology; these poems bypass the mind to warm the heart directly. Remarkable and certain is the achievement of these vital, elegant epiphanies.