The Sacraments of Desire: Poems

Reading Linda Gregg's "The Sacraments of Desire," I am borne by an unmarked tide that dissolves my heart, quickly without notice. But I am not abandoned, I am embraced---by beauty, by strength and most strangely by a wide loneliness that reminds me that I am human, and alive. Bless Linda Gregg. Thank you for such a book. I promise, I "Will listen to the music with unreadable eyes."

I discovered this book by accident in a Michigan bookstore, fumbling around trying to decide whether or not to buy my first Dylan Thomas. I've read and written poetry seriously for a few years now - Sylvia Plath, William Stafford, Anne Sexton. I opened this volume of Linda Gregg's and was immediately taken. "Esta" is, quite possibly, the most beautiful anything I've ever read. How powerful and paradoxical to begin a poem with an image of Christ in a rage, only to end the poem with a woman riding her bicycle through a field of corn. And there is nothing yet said about the lines in between - the river, the sun, the boy...Eso linda..."These Printed Words Are a Place," "The Life of Literature," "Love Late at Night," "The Last Night in Mythmna"...these poems are the stuff of greatness. She has placed herself, with these poems, alongside Plath and Stafford and Bly as one of the late century's most original, most striking poets, inheriting the century's canon from William Carlos Williams, Rilke, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas.