The voice of these poems is clear and strong, rising as it does out of the earth to "the celebrations of the reeds," living simply and daily among cat-tail, wren, peacock, children, women, "praising the coals of heaven" before settling back like the old men of boyhood "wifeless and half wild, / In stained coats, dying like rainbows / from the feet up." These are poems of the real triumphs we seldom understand, the visions of dawn and dusk over the fields and cities where we live, poems that finally embrace even the emptiness "tasting its bitten face." The book also includes a group of superb...

What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened long and late to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same deified heart that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and...