This powerful book is kaleidoscopic in all ways-patterns of language, history, and landscape tumble down the page to be formed anew on the next. It is reflective and absorbing at once. It brings dignity and insight to a raw, unlettered world in order to find its worth and its grief. It is an effort to remember and redeem, and a further effort to find the truth. Yet finally, I think, this book is joyous; it delivers a rare and hard-sought vision of joy. One cannot read this book and not feel lifted and, thereby, free. Maurice Manning, author of "The Gone and the Going Away," Professor of English at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and past recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions.