Five Hearts of Aloneness

The poems in this book, Walker Abel's third collection, seem to spiral around some core yearning or intuition of beauty at the very center of life and experience. There is an ungraspable quality to this realization, a depth without end, but these poems swim, circle, and glimmer from within that water. Some reflect inclinations toward the unity and stillness of Buddhist/Taoist contemplation, while others reach out toward an embodied and passionate engagement with the particulars of life. This is accessible poetry. We feel common ground with the Wanderer: a core sense of self as it moves through interconnections with a multitude of other selves living among, and as, mountains, rivers, sea, desert.