The Holy Worm Of Praise

the holy worm of our tongues singing praiseour faces shining like cities our being one among manyour climbing Jacob's ladder to rock in the arms of angelsour walking here and there on the earth and looking aroundPhilip Schultz's work has always evoked "a brilliant cavalcade of peopleand images that make you want to laugh and cry at the same time"(Yehuda Amichai), but the poems in this new collection-his first in fifteen years--register a movement from desire, pain, and loss to sympathy, understanding, and love. In these meditations on friendship and the forgotten of our world, these elegies for the displaced and cherished dead, there is something new and wonderful-praise.From the seemingly trivial hums and beeps of an answering machine to the painful experience of being touched by Alzheimer's, these extraordinary poems suffuse human experience with the wonder, laughter, and luminosity of life. With an intensity akin to prayer, they celebrate love--be it sexual, familial, romantic, or otherwise--in all its wonder and complexity, singing praise for what is most vulnerable, beautiful, and innocent in ourselves.