The Highwayman's Wife

Husbands, wives, highwaymen. Children, lovers, fathers and sons. This is a book that considers the damage we do to ourselves and others and the ways we find reconciliation, even wholeness in rituals as ancient as digging in the earth, as modern as that last fatal cocktail. A strong and precise formal coherence governs a central narrative core of twelve sonnets, from which the title poem is taken. Wheeling from that center are poems in the tradition of the Shepherd's Calendar that consider the modern shepherd be he aging father, a man in his prime discontent with his world, or a seventh-grade boy, aching for the end of school -- and his desires, failures, triumphs. Throughout, lyric poems speak to the anxiety, the conflicts of modern life, professional and personal, and the happy coincidences that bring joy.