The Stones Keep Watch

"Who hears?" asks the first poem in John Whitney Steele's debut collection. If you are lucky, reader, it's you. Steele waited until he was 60 years old to begin writing poetry in earnest, and his poems comprise discoveries at once serendipitous and aged in silence. From a 16th-century war elephant that's a "descendant of the ten-tusked Airavata" to contemporary poems of lockdown, Steele's poetry ranges widely, a life of love and literature distilled into this book. "What hope have I to leave a mark / some future race will find?" You can find him here, in this book, in "dragonfly samadhi."

-Amit Majmudar, Ohio Poet Laureate, 2016-2017

In The Stones Keep Watch, John Whitney Steele touches eternal things, and his technique as a poet remembers the history of poetry in English. The things of this world and the words that would touch them are gracefully combined. Here is a poet who has learned from both life and art about endurance and what endures. Like Robinson Jeffers, a poet who appears in these pages, he has absorbed multiple traditions into his vision of western landscapes and experience. These are poems of disillusioned love and resonance.

-David Mason, Colorado Poet Laureate, 2010-2014

In The Stones Keep Watch-a remarkable book-John Whitney Steele has gathered together a collection of poems that are not only elegantly written, but also deeply spiritual in content. Many, in fact, take on some of the most profound of humanity's questions, which somehow get resolved-or at least elucidated-thanks to Steele's convincing, graceful manipulation of language. His craftsmanship is apparent throughout: elegant sonnets take their appropriate places alongside variations on the villanelle, the ghazal, a spill of rhymed couplets-plus a fascinating poem titled "The Buddha Said"-which, with its pounding, mostly dimeter lines, might best be described as a chant. Overall, this book is a feast for the reader who wonders, as Steele does, What more does it take?

-Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2009-2010