The Terms of His Surrender

These thirty-six poems are a meditation on the emotional undulations which accompany the progress of love. The blend of passion, doubt, rejection, yearning and joy is embedded in the cumulative uptake of these verses. Against a tableau of the persisting natural rhythms of the sea, the skirmish and proliferation living plants, the earth and the sky, the poet delves sharply into the rough and tumble work of romance, requited and not, attraction, fascination, projection and pain. The satisfaction of following the course of relationships displays the power and promise of love as deep stirrings, testament to hidden veins of truth coursing through our live alongside recurring indignities of human need. Submitting to the compelling urgency of love, this man's quest is about understanding the unforgiving risk of combined destinies in bodies hotly fired and then quiescent. The poems have a certain chronology which is at once specific to the lovers, but as far ranging as a far star or the understory of a forest floor, familiar all. The impact of these poems is to caution those who feel stirrings of this gusto is to invite the reader to wake up and remember, to be an ambassador for this timeless human trek. The sprawling gnaw of not being exactly requited in such matters is accompanied by a patina of hope. These lovers are fighters too.