This Uncertain Voyage

This collection of poems explores the ambiguities of existence by re-visiting personal memories and narratives, and re-imagining the future. Perspectives often change by “taking a second look”—at a photo or familiar work of art, hearing anew a Bach Sarabande, or recalling the strains of a love song. Even news of a scientific discovery, or the rise of hate-filled violence in our country presses us to re-examine long-held assumptions about what we think we know—about family relationships, mortality, political truths, the mysteries of the planet. As fellow voyagers faced with the uncertainty of life, we can see through widened lenses and come away with renewed appreciation for this world—for the goldfinches and magnolias—miracles of this “accidental habitat“.

Alive in This Place

The poems in this collection travel across lifetimes, each twist and turn of the outer world reflecting an inner landscape, narratives unfolding against ever–changing backdrops—places, seasons, decades. They trace the complexities of an ordinary life through the histories and environments that gave them shape–shifting from homes and tree–lined neighborhoods, to a rain–soaked cemetery, an opera house in Hanoi, a beach in Ceylon, a village in Poland. In them are the contradictions and surprises, moods and modulations of individual experience, evoking both the transitory nature of our world and the timelessness of the human condition.

Open Wide, The Eye

Moments of attentiveness illuminate our world, interrupting the rush of time to make each flash a revelation. Stopping to see what we may not have noticed, to listen, to feel, to remember past sensations, deepens our insights. This collection of poems examines the art of seeing with all the senses, unveiling the essential realities hidden in the common objects and experiences which inform our humanity. The attraction of rabbit to ripening pear, the crunch of shells on the beach, connections with strangers, with our families and places from the past, with a fresco, a wood engraving, a Bach oratorio... these small epiphanies are “the lingering strands of light…that bind each morning to the next.”

What We Take With Us

Through the prisms of love and loss, memory, individual narratives, and the natural world, this collection of poems celebrates the bounty of life—ordinary human experience as an act of discovery. Meaningful gifts abound in the small and often astonishing details which serve to define the human condition.