Stone Altars is a book of poems by an aging man still engaged in asking fundamental questions, never to be answered, which have haunted him since boyhood. It is a poetry of sea, sun, and sky, trees, rocks, streams, and hills, of loss, time, death, and memory, friends, lovers, and families. It seeks in forms the resonance they offer from the past, how their sounds and shapes expand meaning beyond what words alone can say. It searches in stories and writings from various sacred traditions for images and metaphors which can still be borrowed for serious thought in poetry today. The old questions suffice and endure: mortality, the brevity of all human life, but particularly of youth, the tragic beauty of the world, love’s pain and beneficence, the call to compassion. These are the themes that recur in Stone Altars, that its poems brood about and ponder in ways always attentive to the particular, faithful to Pound’s great admonition: Go in fear of abstractions.