Fr Pierre-Jean De Smet, SJ is one of the most remarkable among the great missionary figures of the Society of Jesus. Born in Belgium, he emigrated to the United States to enter the Jesuit novitiate and was ordained in Missouri in 1837. He founded St Joseph's Mission at Council Bluffs for the Potawatomies in 1838, and visited the Sioux to arrange a peace between that nation and the Potawatomies, the first of his many peace missions. In 1840 he set out for the territory of the Flatheads in the far Northwest, and established St Mary's Mission on the Bitter Root River in Montana, and three years...

As the title poem suggests, delays arrive exclusively on a personal level. (Not that some collective surface hasn't been scratched; it has, but that surface is relatively inconsequential.) We must follow such scars; it's who we are. This volume begins and ends just beyond the delays, far enough outside our souls to allow us to discover new ways to return. As these poems insist, the return is crucial. Bishop describes a few of his own reappearances, hopeful that the unusable track he leaves behind might remind readers of a few of their own delays and how their own expectations have been...