The Old Man and the Sea is a deceptively simple work. An old man goes fishing. He catches a giant marlin after much struggle. Sharks attack and destroy the fish. The old man is left with the bare bones of the fish—a Monday morning “fish story.” But much lies beneath the surface. The action is condensed and presented in carefully crafted images, in words and details selected because of their multivalent meanings, and in several external narrative strands, present primarily as allusions ...

This collection of poems was assembled from five decades of writing. Uniting the poems is an attempt to find words that record the material world while also cracking it open to the mystery that animates all things. In this sense, the poems, even the secular and humorous among them, manifest the sacred, the holy present in every human, plant or rock. Should a label be put on the collection, and none fit well, they are poems built from concrete images, from a full opening of the senses, thou...