Contagious Magic: Collected Poems

Always light-gathering, these poems move back and forth among the places that have been essential to the poet’s life–New Mexico and the southwest, old Roman vestiges in northern Italy, a longtime home next to a synagogue in northern California, the color-drenched French countryside of artist Pierre Bonnard. The magic of the title is carried by spices and pigments, water and birds, bright strings of turquoise and branches of pine. As traveler, word-peddler, and celebrant of joie de vivre, the poet’s quest has been to gather luminous ingredients wherever they are found.