In Praise of When Angels Are Born Ron Starbuck's new poetry collection When Angels Are Born is a meditation, a prayer, a beautiful love song, an invitation "to sit quietly, in silence and in strength" and be transported into a world filled with light, where "we live inside one another" and where forgiveness is found. These uplifting and transcendent poems envelop the reader with grace and gratitude and echo these lines by St. Francis of Assisi: "All the darkness in the world cannot/ extinguish the light of a single candle." We are urged to "live inside the mystery" within "infinite possibilities". Ron Starbuck reminds us "to become a sacrament of seeing," that "the mind is indeed a tremendous traveler" and "the heart is the first instrument of heaven." At times lyrical and at times narrative, these are healing, transformative poems, suspended at the edge of the soul: "be at peace, the world/ and heaven await/ your surrender/ for each moment/ of your life." We are invited on a journey where "all the hardness/ of life simply diffuses/ like my breath/ into air." This is the voice of all creation, "you travel upon God's holy breath," invoking the eternal: "yours is a mighty soul,/ new as the earth was young,/ and older still." ~ Hélène Cardona, Actor, poet and Henry James Scholar, author of Dreaming My Animal Selves, Life in Suspension: La Vie Suspendue. Ron Starbuck is my kind of poet - he writes with a clarity and simplicity that draw me into feelings and images that can never be clear and simple. His angels can be seen everywhere, but they speak of mystery that can never be captured anywhere. My favorite among his angels is his dog, "Nick," his "old friend" who "taught me the truth of unconditional love." ~ Paul F. Knitter, Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions, and Culture, Union Theological Seminary, New York, and author of Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian. Ron Starbuck makes his poems from a very particular point of inflection, reflection and at times of deep genuflection. There are moments of lyrical beauty, of human intimacy shared with the stranger-reader that elevates the personal into the universal. There are also insights born of deep experience and transmuted into words and rhythm that gently and powerfully invoke the sense of the sacred. This marriage of emotion and spiritual consciousness makes this poetry especially memorable and helpful to the quest for the personal knowledge of truth that his readers will be urged more eagerly to make as they become more familiar with his voice and vision. ~ Laurence Freeman OSB, author of First Sight: The Experience of Faith, and Jesus The Teacher Within.