Songs for a Summons

The majority of the poems in this collection were written very early in the morning, as if they had been readying themselves in sleep, dreams, and darkness, galvanizing themselves, effervescing.  As a fiction writer, I normally sit at a desk, but these poems wanted to be handwritten by a fireplace, where they were coaxed into form by heat, incandescence, and a relative silence.

I live near woodlands, and inevitably meet animals waking and sleeping, and have found, too, that they live inside my poems--as do the incidental places I've visited on foot over many seasons.  I'm a lover of the world's trim and tackle, of its forgotten quotidian, and see existence as a manifest miracle, unfathomable at its core.  All of this guided Songs for a Summons into the world--a first book of poems that found me after decades of fiction writing, like a gift and a surprise.