Love Threads can be a painful book because it is about a hurtful relationship, but more important, it is a clear call to love and to love even when there is difficulty. A clear call to love spiritually and in body. It is essentially a transcendent calling, an ecstatic one-and a genuine journey of love. These are poems whose obscurity win their way graciously with resonances that wistfully suggest sweetness and light without identifying many specifics or concrete manifestations of the sacred other. These poems make up invocations that appeal through the plausible and very humane nexus of...

What Body? You still believe the body is a temple for the spirit? Then read Thomas Ramey Watson and be delighted and appalled with him The Necessity of Symbols plays again and again on the sacredness of the body-the body in love, the body in ecstasy of spirit and memory, even the body of Christ in communion. Like the forgotten troubadours, the poet gives a credible poetic ground that loving the beloved's body is close to loving God, or at least appreciating the universe. "Knot Intrinsicate" celebrates a woman's power: I am seventeen- you, soft-voiced Guenevere. But a Russian doll, you held...