Secondary Sources

For many years now, I've admired the quietly beautiful, technically accomplished, and moving poems of Mikel Vause. He seems only to go from strength to strength, gifted with a natural ear for the music of language and a keen love for what Richard Wilbur once called 'the things of this world.' But this world is otherworldly, too. Like the Emersonian he is, Vause understands that nature is a symbol of spirit and that every natural thing is a sign, a call from beyond. I read his latest poems with keen pleasure, and feel grateful for his presence on the page."

Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015

From Robert Frost to men falling for the rest of their lives, Mikel Vause examines the divide between poetry, reality, the sublime, and the fantastical, all the while with a passion for mortality and for the questions that entails. As he says in this collection, "Paths want walking."

Phyllis Barber, author of The Desert Between Us and other books

In his latest collection, Mikel Vause weaves together a series of brilliant threads: figures like Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman fall alongside Abraham Lincoln and Shelby Foote and intertwine with ruminations on war, growing up, and God. And at the center of these is the sense that Vause is "captivated by natural magic" in the world around us. As he says, "worship is innate," and his poetic worship bends itself toward a love of humankind and the earth we live on.

Sunni Wilkinson, author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field