Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations--wait, that should be luminous meditations--are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that sentimentality, to killing someone in your basement, or turning into a locust, or imagining his wife's violent death, Cummins hasn't lost his touch. Though he does lose his hand in one of these. Maybe it should be numinous meditations? In various emergencies?

In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of culture and the quotidian.

The poems in Civil Twilight animate the present with a resonant sense of the past as character and as compass. The poems in the collection reveal a fascination with the possibilities that exist at every moment and the human urge to resist the inevitable and keep those possibilities open. The language of these poems is personal and precise, attuned to the mind and the ear, and, with each line, readers are reminded of the perilous nature of our existence here on earth and of the joys our lives hold.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alan Dugan described Skoyles's poems as "clear-eyed but passionate, sarcastic but grave, all at the same time." That description holds true for this selection of poems from his previous four books: A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. The title, taken from the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, alludes to the temporal quality of existence, how one moves from sunlight to twilight in the course of a lifetime. And how those evening hours arrive suddenly, as if in no time at all.

Praise for John Skoyles:

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