Federico García Lorca did not know Miller Williams, of course, but he was describing him when he told us that a poet is “professor of the five senses.” The poems in this collection cover thirty years of loving contact with the endlessly varied surfaces of the world. They are poems in which the common furniture of our lives is always present, in which the universal resides in the local, in which elegance is born of clarity. We have enough to fret about. Almost all of us concur, we’ll live with the holidays we have and the grace of God as if it were. (“He Speaks to His Arguing Friends and to Himself”) The poems are moments from human lives turned into art, but never removed from where they were found. Grass grows out of every sidewalk crack. Briars have taken the garden. The arteries of the old dog harden almost audibly. The basement door is broken and the mice are back. (“A Summer Afternoon An Old Man Gives Some Thought to the Central Questions”) As John Ciardi wrote of Williams and his work, “Taken beginning to end, as both the word and the fact go, these are remarkable poems for―among other things―the deceptively plain straightforwardness of them. Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable, doing this, is how perilously close he plays to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.” Aesthetic Distance After A Brubeck Concert After The Revolution For Jesus A Secular Man Prepares Final Remarks After You Die You Don't Give A Piddling Damn The Aging Actress Sees Herself A Starlet On The Late Show Allende At The End And Then And When In Scenes Of Glory Animals The Associate Professor Delivers An Exhortation To His Failing Student An August Evening Outside Of Nashville Before Being Here Believing In Symbols The Book The Caterpillar Divorce Documenting It Entropy Euglena Evening: A Studio In Rome Everything Is Fine Here. How Are You? The Firebreathers At The Cafe Deux Magots Fly Me To The Moon For Lucinda, Robert, And Karyn For Lucy, On Her Birthday For Reuben, At Twelve Months For Victor Jara Form And Theory Of Poetry The Friend Getting Experience Getting The Message The Ghost Of His Wife Comes To Tell Him How It Is Ghosts The Gift Of Prophecy Lost A Glass Darkly He Glimpses A Nobler Vision He Speaks To His Arguing Friends And To Himself The House In The Vacant Lot How Does A Madsong Know That's What It Is? How The Elephant Got His Hump How To Stop Smoking Husband I Go Out Of The House For The First Time In A Gradually Moving Car Somewhere In Calcutta In Another Town In Extremis In Hardy, Arkansas In Nashville, Standing In The Wooden Circle .. Picker Has A Vision In Your Own Words Without Lying Tell Something Of Your Backround ... Jonathan Aging The Journalist Buys A Pig Farm La Ultima Carta: A Young Wife Writes To Her Husband In The Mountains Late Show Let Me Tell You A Little Poem Living On The Surface Logos (1) Lost In Ladispoli Love And How It Becomes Important In Our Day-to-day-lives Love In The Cathedral Love Poem Main Street The Man Who Stays Up Late Mecanic On Duty At All Times Memphis, 2:00 P.m. Missing Persons The Muse My Wife Reads The Paper At Breakfast A Newspaper Picture Of Spectators At A Hotel Fire Normandy Beach Notes From The Agent On Earth: How To Be Human On A Photograph Of My Mother At Seventeen On A Trailways Bus A Man Who Holds His Head Strangely Speaks ... On Hearing About The Death Of Mitzi Mayfair On The Death Of A Middle-aged Man On The Symbolic Consideration Of Hands And The Significance Of Death On The Way Home From Nowhere, New Year's Eve One Day A Woman One Of The Crowd On The Shore Tells How It Was One Of Those Rare Occurrences On A City Bus The Ones That Are Thrown Out Original Sin Paying Some Slight Attention To His Birthday ... Of Praise People Picker Pity And Fear Plain A Poem For Emily The Promotion Reading The Newspaper On Microfilm Rebecca At Play Rituals Rock Rubaiyat For Sue Ella Tucker Ruby Tells All Running Into Things Sale Schumann Adds Trombones To Second Symphony After Mendelsson Conducts The Senator Explains A Vote Sir Sitting Alone At Sunrise: Problems In The Space - Time Continuum Some Lines Finished Just Before Dawn ... Snowed All Night Staying The Story Style A Summer Afternoon An Old Man Gives Some Thought To Central Questions The Survivor Tearing Down The Hotel Thinking About Bill, Dead Of Aids Thinking Friday Night With A Gothic Storm Going About Final Causes ... A Toast To Floyd Collins Today Is Wednesday Trying Trying To Remember The Vanishing Po