These Hands of Myrrh

This beautiful book by Scott Ferry is filled with ghostly plainsongs sung between fathers and daughters and sons (and who isn't one of these) as they evolve toward and eventually away from one another. There is an urgency here to harvest-before it's too late-that love particular to parents that rewrites itself in the palimpsest of a child. This is a book about sacred relationships and the power of tenderness. The poems in These Hands of Myrrh are ricochets from the front line born out of courage in the face of mortality. They have traveled through hard-earned wisdom to get to us. And as readers we can be thankful they arrived.

-Gary Lemons, author of The Snake Quartet

This collection immerses you gently, gradually, into a world where the mundane and the miraculous live side by side. Ferry shows us life and death, both the big moments (the birth of his son, the death of a neighbor, confronting alcoholism), as well as the small (gardening, a flight of birds, cleaning the fish tank). Before you know it, you are down in the underworld with him. Somehow, reality has shifted: ghosts communicate through streetlights. Trees have auras. The relationships between fathers and sons takes on a mythic quality. These poems are sharp, incisive, yet lyrical, often funny. Like all spiritual journeys, this book feels sometimes elemental and sometimes frightening, but always ends on a note of hope.

-Lauren Scharhag, author of Languages, First and Last

Don't let Scott Ferry's poems fool you and don't fail to let them captivate you. Their seemingly fragile beauty belies the tensile strength of a healer. They illustrate with precision the perspective of one who faces life and death on a daily basis, not losing either his grief over the inevitability of the former or the wonder and fleeting joy of the latter. Author Christopher Moore writes that children see magic because they never stop seeking it. Neither does Ferry. He illustrates a stippled landscape with flashes of gentle humor and softly graded shadows-repeated small touches, expertly placed, telling in the thought and affect they provoke in the reader. These poems linger long after reading them-for good reason.

-Jonathan Yungkans, author of Beneath a Glazed Shadow