Grace Street 14+

📗 "I live at a spirit address," Edward A. Dougherty assures himself in this suite of twelve meditations, Grace Street. He inhales the domestic, and his teaching life, and the nature of morning glories and turtles, and, it seems, the whole vast east of empty-mind Buddha-nothingness to keep arriving at that address despite a world that often seems a "valley of tears." Reading this fine collection, I found myself within a process of "slow revelation," felt myself in the presence of quiet power as he breathes words and comes to realize, again and again, that love (and such a complex love that it resists definition, as it should) must be "The scripture of each day / we author and read," or we are lost. Dougherty can help us author our days.-William Heyen, author of CRAZY HORSE & THE CUSTERSGRACE STREET gives us poems gleaned by close attention, anchored by earth, deepened by word, lifted by the slow dawning of spirit. I read them with gratitude, with relish, with respect.-Margaret Gibson, author of BROKEN CUPEdward Dougherty's poems fuse the philosopher and spiritual seer in him with the close observer of the natural world in its many facts, forces, weathers. Anchored in the actual, he can rise to rapture without sentimentality, and use with authority words like nobility, salvation, grace and mystery. Whether sensing how "The flames of grace flare up / beyond the personal," or noting "the silent angle of owl-flight between sassafra...