A book of poems inspired by and dedicated to the author's wife, meditations on love and a 45-year marriage. "This work is mature, the writing brilliant and rich and deep, the content charged with energy. This is an incredible writer, one with a deep and wide scope of vision." Linda Hogan, novelist; poet, author of Rounding the Human Corners: Poems and People of the Whale: A Novel "[Douglas Nicholas has a] quality which I find very engaging, namely, a kind of urban gaslight aura which manages to be new/old simultaneously. This is dense stuff . . . this work requires a slow pace. Take the poem ['A Calling-Up Song'], for instance; I could see teaching this one to a class for a week or more and still not finishing with its various resonances. . . . "I have been reading Douglas Nicholas's poems for some time now, and always with increasing pleasure. Perhaps their greatest virtue is their inclusivity, for these are poems of color, detail and texture. At a time when far too many poets are justifying their metabolic deficiencies in the name of Minimalism, Nicholas is striding the landscape as vigorously as Whitman ever did. He's a Maximalist, in my book, and we the readers are the better for it. A Nicholas poem is always a feast. . . ." David Kirby, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, FSU; poetry reviewer, The New York Times Book Review; poet, author of The Temple Gate Called Beautiful and The House on Boulevard Street Douglas Nicholas is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications, among them Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sonora Review, Circumference, A Different Drummer, and Cumberland Review, as well as the South Coast Poetry Journal, where he won a prize in that publication's Fifth Annual Poetry Contest. Other awards include Honorable Mention in the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation 2003 Prize For Poetry Awards, second place in the 2002 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards from PCCC, International Merit Award in Atlanta Review's Poetry 2002 competition, finalist in the 1996 Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry Competition, honorable mention in the 1992 Scottish International Open Poetry Competition, first prize in the journal Lake Effect's Sixth Annual Poetry Contest, first prize in poetry in the 1990 Roberts Writing Awards, and finalist in the Roberts short fiction division. He was also recipient of an award in the 1990 International Poetry Contest sponsored by the Arvon Foundation in Lancashire, England, and a Cecil B. Hackney Literary Award for poetry from Birmingham-Southern College. He is the author of Something Red, a fantasy novel set in the thirteenth century; Iron Rose, a collection of poems inspired by and set in New York City; The Old Language, reflections on the company of animals; and The Rescue Artist, poems about his wife and their long marriage. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Theresa and Yorkshire terrier Tristan.