Earthen Vessels
Praise for
“Turn these pages and hear the distinct click of a camera, as prose and poems blend into richly detailed snapshots of a poet’s earliest formative years. There he is, nourished in a kitchen filled with joyous music and regular news-of-the-day debates around the supper table. There he is again, left reeling by a mother’s alcoholism and a father’s unpredictable anger. And again, falling into a deep love sparked by shared wonder for the world, for spirit, for conversation that can be prayer. And there he is, drifting in boats, and in the lonely gulf between himself an age-old world holding trials and wonders and trials again. A young man whose father fought in the war to end all wars and who serves in his own war as a Conscientious Objector. Mature, sober, grateful, graceful and thriving, staring without a blink into generational trauma, the-now-78-year-old poet lifts the curtain on his initial view of the world, on what held him together throughout those years, including a moment he first felt it time “to cast off, give the oars a pull.” You will sit beside him gladly, not caring the destination. —Suzanne Strempek Shea, Author of Sundays in America