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20 June 2012

4th Review of CADUCEUS

M.E. Hitchcock has graciously reviewed Caduceus on amazon. Here is the complete review:

A book worth reading more than once

This beautiful little book is completely full of love. There is a love of words and of learning, a love of place and family, a love of myth and legend, of love itself, of symbolism, and most importantly (to me) a love of presence and (most importantly to the author) a love of God.

There is a lot to see here in this deceptively thin volume. I read through it one sunny Sunday and was moved by so many images. I let it sit for a few weeks and two images haunted me still: a sexy drop of oil poised to drip and end bliss, and climbers dwarfed by then killed by the earth and the ice and the winds and the Voice of God which has made them.

But haunt isn't the right word either. These images persisted and lived in me. They became part of me somehow. I have remembered them not as something I read, but as something that happened to me. There is no higher praise I can give a poem.

The prologue promises and the book delivers on a wide variety of voice, subject, and complexity. there ought to be at least one poem in here that just instantly makes sense for each reader. And each poem is of a very high level of craft, so whatever specific one grabs you, you can be sure that the others are just as good, if you've a will to understand them.

The epilogue is a beautiful little offering of humility to both Higgins' God and her art. This is a humility that is in each poem and thus this is an author that does not get in her own way at all.

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