A Far Country Here

The six sections of this collection are like a sequence of musical variations on the theme of personal identity as it develops from childhood to death. The first section evokes the poet's experience of being lost, of his search for identity, and of his being found by God. Section II, in a kind of echo of Section I, celebrates the successive seasons of nature and functions as a metaphor for the movement through a life. Section III is a boisterous fugue on the high drama of clouds in the course of a day, from dawn to nightfall. Section IV, in a series of portraits of persons (and of a cat!), some dead, some living, intimates the mystery of friendship, love, and loss. Section V contains narratives, drawn from history and nature, that extend this mystery to the link human beings intuitively sense between this world and a "world elsewhere." In the final section, the poet's personal experience resurfaces as he contemplates, with wonder and gratitude, his course through the years from childhood to old age, even through death itself to the "far country" he has sensed and longed for all his life.