Tenebrae

The lead poem in this collection, "Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death," is a lovely bracelet of verse and prose poems that link brilliantly together in a gripping narrative and wrenching emotional journey through the illness and death of his wife. Other poems in the book - including several snapshot portraits of Max's extended family under the title "The Irish in America" - reflect this same grappling with the fundamental issues of our lives - loss, change, growth, hope, despair and acceptance, reflecting throughout a compassionate embrace of the human condition. These are truly poems for the people - plain but exquisitely crafted, direct as a dagger, and expressed in a language that is both elegant and easy to understand at the same time. They reach from the heart to the heart.