"The interleaving of light and dark in these poems is the fitful undulation between perception and memory, the clear-eyed candor and grace of childhood and the somber gratitude of hindsight, the event fully inhabited and the terrible recognition of its fugacity... And yet, in this collection's careful vision, mortality is neither lamented nor deplored, for by gentling time's implacable edges into lyric moments again and again what this consoling and generous poet bestows upon us is nothing if not the two-toned rondure of haunted illumination--the beautiful shadow which is also, astonishingly, our fathomless depth." - J. Neil C. Garcia