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